Let me put it in another way. It has often been said that ‘the law forbids men to do only what their instincts incline them to do’. It follows from this that if there are laws against theft, murder and rape, then the human animal must, by nature, be a thieving, murderous rapist. Is this really a fair description of man as a social biological species? Somehow, it does not fit the zoological picture of the emerging tribal species. Sadly, however, it does fit the super-tribal picture.
Theft, perhaps the most common of crimes, is a good example. A member of a super-tribe is under pressure, suffering from all the stresses and strains of his artificial social condition. Most people in his super-tribe are strangers to him; he has no personal, tribal bond with them. The typical thief is not stealing from one of his known companions. He is not breaking the old, biological tribal code. In his mind, he is simply setting his victim outside his tribe altogether. To counteract this, a super-tribal law has to be imposed. It is relevant here that we sometimes talk of ‘honour among thieves’ and the ‘code of the underworld’. This underlines the fact that we look upon criminals as belonging to a separate and distinct pseudo-tribe within the super-tribe. In passing, it is interesting to note how we deal with the criminal: we shut him away in a confined, all-criminal community. As a short-term solution it works well enough, but the long-term effect is that it strengthens his pseudo-tribal identity instead of weakening it and furthermore helps him to widen his pseudo-tribal social contacts.
Reconsidering the idea that ‘the law forbids men to do only what their instincts incline them to do’, we might re-word it to the effect that ‘the law forbids men to do only what the artificial conditions of civilization drive them to do’. In this way we can see the law as a balancing device, tending to counteract the distortions of super-tribal existence and helping to maintain, in unnatural conditions, the forms of social conduct natural to the human species.
However, this is an over-simplification. It implies perfection in the leaders, the law-makers. Tyrants and despots can, of course, impose harsh and unreasonable laws restraining the population to a greater extent than is justified by the prevailing super-tribal conditions. A weak leadership may impose a system of law that lacks the strength to hold together a teeming populace. Either way lies cultural disaster or decline.
There is also another kind of law that has little to do with the argument I have been putting forward, except that it serves to hold society together. It is an ‘isolating law’, one which helps to make one culture different from another. It gives cohesion to a society by providing it with a unique identity. These laws play only a minor role in the law courts. They are more the concern of religion and social custom. Their function is to increase the illusion that one belongs to a unified tribe rather than a sprawling, seething super-tribe. If they are criticized because they seem arbitrary or meaningless, the answer comes back that they are traditional and must be obeyed without question. It is as well not to question them because, in themselves, they are arbitrary and frequently meaningless. Their value lies in the fact that they are shared by all the members of the community. When they fade, the unity of the community fades a little, too. They take many forms: the elaborate procedures of social ceremonies— marriages, burials, celebrations, parades, festivals and the rest; the intricacies of social etiquette, manners and protocol; the complexities of social costume, uniform decoration, adornment and display.
These subjects have been studied in detail by ethnologists and cultural anthropologists, who have been fascinated by their great diversity. Diversity, the differentiation of one culture from another, has, of course, been the very function of these patterns of behaviour. But in marvelling at their variety, one must not overlook their fundamental similarities. The customs and costumes may be strikingly different in detail from culture to culture, but they have the same basic function and the same basic forms. If you start by making a list of all the social customs of one particular culture, you will find equivalents to nearly all of them in nearly all other cultures. Only the details will differ, and they will differ so wildly that they will sometimes obscure the fact that you are dealing with the same basic social patterns.
To give an example: in some cultures ceremonies of mourning involve the wearing of black costumes; in others, by complete contrast, the mourning dress is white. Furthermore, if you cast the net wide enough, you can find still other cultures that employ dark blue, or grey, or yellow, or natural brown sackcloth. Having grown up yourself in a culture where, from early childhood, one of these colours, say black, has been heavily associated with death and mourning, it will be startling to think of wearing such colours as yellow or blue in this context. Therefore, your immediate reaction on discovering that these colours are worn as mourning dress in other places is to remark on how different they are from your own familiar custom. Herein lies the trap, so neatly set by the demands of cultural isolation. The superficial observation that the colours vary so dramatically obscures the more basic fact that all these cultures share the performance of a mourning ‘display’, and that in all of them it involves the wearing of a costume that is strikingly different from the non-mourning costume.
In the same way, when an Englishman first visits Spain, he is surprised to find the public spaces of the towns and villages thronged with people in the early evening, all wandering up and down in an. apparently aimless way. His immediate reaction is not that this is their cultural equivalent of his more familiar cocktail parties, but rather that it is some sort of strange local custom. Again, the basic social pattern is the same, but the details differ.
Similar examples could be given to cover almost all forms of communal activity, the principle being that the more social the occasion, the more variable the details and the stranger the other culture’s behaviour appears to be at first sight. The greatest social occasions of all, such as coronations, state funerals, balls, banquets, independence celebrations, investitures, great sporting events, military parades, festivals and garden parties (or their equivalents), are the ones where the isolating laws play the strongest part. They vary from case to case in a thousand tiny details, each of which is scrupulously attended to, as though the very lives of the participants depended upon it. In a sense, of course, their social lives do depend on it, for it is only by their conduct in public places that they can strengthen and support their feelings of social identity, of belonging to a cultural group, and the grander the occasion, the stronger the boost.
This is a fact that successful revolutionaries sometimes overlook or underestimate. In ridding themselves of the old power structure that they have come to detest, they are forced to sweep away with it most of the old ceremonials. Even though these ritual procedures may have nothing directly to do with the overthrown power system, they are too strongly reminiscent of it and must go. A few hurriedly improvised performances may be put in their place, but it is difficult to invent rituals overnight. (It is an interesting sidelight on the Christian movement that its early success depended to some extent on its making a take-over bid for many of the old pagan ceremonies and incorporating them, suitably disguised, into their own festive occasions.) When all the excitement and upheaval of the revolution is over, the eventual unhappiness of many a disgruntled post-revolutionary is due, in a concealed way, to his sense of loss of social occasion and pageantry. Revolutionary leaders would do well to anticipate this problem. It is not the chains of social identity that their followers will want to break, it is the chains of a particular social identity. As soon as these are smashed, they will need new ones and will soon become dissatisfied merely with an abstract sense of ‘freedom’. Such are the demands of the isolating laws.
Other aspects of social behaviour are also brought into play as cohesive forces. Language is one of these. We tend to think of language exclusively as a communication device, but it is more than that. If it were not, we should all be speaking with the same tongue. Looking back through super-tribal history, it is easy to see how the anti-communicatio
n function of language has been almost as important as its communication function. More than any social custom, it has set up enormous inter-group barriers. More than anything else, it has identified an individual as a member of a particular super-tribe, and put obstacles in the way of his defecting to another group.
As the super-tribes have grown and merged, so local languages have been merged, or submerged, and the total number in the world is being reduced. But as this happens, a counter-trend develops: accents and dialects become more socially significant; slang, cant and jargon are invented. As the members of a massive super-tribe attempt to strengthen their tribal identities by setting up sub-groups, so a whole spectrum of ‘tongues’ develops within the official, major language. Just as English and German act as identity badges and isolating mechanisms between an Englishman and a German, so an upper-class English accent isolates its owner from a lower-class one, and the jargon of chemistry and psychiatry isolates chemists from psychiatrists. (It is a sad fact that the academic world which, in its educational role, should be devoted to communication above all else, exhibits pseudo-tribal isolating languages as extreme as criminal slang. The excuse is that precision of expression demands it. This is true up to a point, but the point is frequently and blatantly exceeded.)
The jargon of slang words can become so specialized that it is almost as if a new language is being born. It is typical of slang expressions that once they spread and become common property, they are replaced with new terms by the originating sub-group. If they are adopted by the whole super-tribe and slide into the official language, then they have lost their original function. (It is doubtful whether you are using the same slang expression for, say, an attractive girl, a policeman, or a sexual act, that your parents employed when they were your age. But you still use the same official words.) In extreme cases, one sub-group will adopt an entirely foreign language. The Russian court at one point, for example, spoke in French. In Britain one still sees remnants of this kind of behaviour at the more expensive restaurants, where the menus are usually in French.
Religion has operated in much the same way as language, strengthening bonds within a group and weakening them between groups. It acts on the single, simple premise that there are powerful forces at work above and beyond the ordinary human members of the group and that these forces, these super-leaders or gods, must be pleased, appeased and obeyed without question. The fact that they are never around to be questioned helps them to maintain their position.
At first the powers of the gods were limited and their spheres of influence divided, but as the super-tribes swelled to increasingly unmanageable proportions, greater cohesive forces were needed. A government of minor gods was not strong enough. A massive super-tribe required a single, all-powerful, all-wise, all-seeing god, and from the ancient candidates it was this type that won through and survived the passage of the centuries. In the smaller and more backward cultures today the minor gods still rule, but members of all the major cultures have turned to the single super-god.
It is a common observation that the power of religion as a social force has been weakening during recent years. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, it is failing to serve its double function as a cohesive influence. As the populations continued to grow and swell, the ancient empires became unmanageable and split up into national groups. The new super-tribes fought to establish their identities, using all the usual devices. But many of them now shared a common religion. This meant that, for them, religion, although still a powerful force for bonding together the members of a nation, failed in its other cohesive function, namely to weaken the bonds between nations. A compromise was reached by the formation of sects within a major religion. Although sectarianism put back some of the isolating qualities and helped to tribalize, or localize, religious ceremonies again, it was only a partial solution.
The second reason for its loss of power was the growing standard of widespread scientific education, with its increasing demands that the individual should ask questions, rather than blindly accept dogmas. The Christian religion, in particular, has suffered serious setbacks. The increasingly logical mind of the Western super-tribesman cannot help but notice certain glaring illogicalities. Perhaps the most important of these is the great discrepancy between, on the one hand, the teaching of humility and gentleness and, on the other, the elaborate finery, pomp and power of the Church leaders.
In addition to law, custom, language and religion there is another, more violent form of cohesive force that helps to bind the members of a super-tribe together, and that is war. To put it cynically, one could say that nothing helps a leader like a good war. It gives him his only chance of being a tyrant and being loved for it at the same time. He can introduce the most ruthless forms of control and send thousands of his followers to their deaths and still be hailed as a great protector. Nothing ties tighter the in-group bonds than an out-group threat.
The fact that internal squabbles are suppressed by the existence of a common enemy has not escaped the attention of rulers past and present. If an overgrown super-tribe is beginning to split at the seams, the splits can rapidly be stitched up by the appearance of a powerful hostile them that converts us into a unified us. Just how often leaders have deliberately manipulated an inter-group clash with this in mind, it is hard to say, but whether the move is consciously deliberate or not, the cohesive reaction nearly always occurs. It takes a remarkably inefficient leader to bungle it. Of course, he has to have an enemy who is capable of being painted in sufficiently villainous colours, or he is likely to be in trouble. The disgusting horrors of war become converted into glorious battles only when the threat from outside is really serious, or can be made to seem so.
Despite its attractions to a ruthless leader, war has an obvious disadvantage: one side is liable to be utterly defeated and it might be his. The super-tribesman can be grateful for this unfortunate drawback.
These, then, are the cohesive forces that are brought to bear on the great urban societies. Each has developed its own specialized kind of leader: the administrator, the judge, the politician, the social leader, the high priest, the general. In simpler times they were all rolled into one, an omnipotent emperor or king who was able to cope with the whole range of leadership. But as time has passed and the groups have expanded, the true leadership has shifted from one sphere to another, moving to whichever category happens to contain the most exceptional individual.
In more recent times it has often become the practice to allow the populace to have a say in the election of a new leader. This political device has, in itself, been a valuable cohesive force, giving the super-tribesmen a greater feeling of ‘belonging’ to their group and having some influence over it. Once the new leader has been elected it soon becomes clear that the influence is slighter than imagined, but nevertheless at the time of the election itself a valuable ripple of social identity runs through the community.
A-s at^ aid to this process, local pseudo-tribal sub-leaders are sent to participate in the government of the land. In some countries this has become little more than a ritual act, since the ‘local’ representatives are no more than imported professionals. However, this type of distortion is inevitable in a community as complex as a modern super-tribe.
The aim of government by elected representatives is fine and clear, even if it is difficult to match in practice. It is based on a partial return to the ‘politics’ of the original human tribal system, where each member of the tribe (or at least, the adult males) had a say in the running of the society. They were, in a sense, communists, with the emphasis on sharing and with little regard for the rigid protection of personal property. Property was as much for giving as for keeping. But as I have said before, the tribes were small and everyone knew everyone else. They may have prized individual possessions, but doors and locks were things of the future. As soon as the tribe had become an impersonal super-tribe, with strangers in its midst, the rigorous protection of property became necessary and b
egan to play a much larger role in social life. Any political attempt to ignore this fact would meet with considerable difficulties. Modem communism is beginning to find this out and has already started to adjust its system accordingly.
Another adjustment was also necessary in all cases where the aim was to reinstate the ancient tribal-hunter pattern of ‘government of the people, by the people’. The supertribes were simply too big and the problems of government too complex, too technical. The situation demanded a system of representation and it demanded a professional class of experts. Just how far this can get away from ‘government by the people’ was clearly illustrated in England recently when it was suggested that parliamentary debates should be televised so that, thanks to modern science, the populace could at last play a more intimate role in the affairs of state. But this would have interfered with the specialized, professional atmosphere and was hotly opposed and rejected. So much for government by the people. However, this is not surprising. Running a super-tribe is like trying to balance an elephant on a tight-rope. It seems that the best that any modern political system can hope for is to use right-wing methods to implement left-wing policies. (This is, in effect, what is being done both in the East and the West at the present moment.) It is a difficult trick to pull off and requires great professional finesse, not to mention double-talk. If modern politicians are frequently the subject of scorn and satire, it is because too many people see through the trick too often. But given the size of the present super-tribes there appears to be no alternative.
The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal Page 3