THE IMPORTANCE OF THE COLLECTIVE IN HUMAN HISTORY

Jim Ward


One of the greatest challenges facing humankind in the world today is to recognize the importance of the collective. By the collective I mean any situation in which people join together with some kind of notion that this is for the good of all the members of that collective. The 19th century pioneer of sociology and anthropology, Emile Durkheim stressed the notion that to be human one has to belong to some group that is more than him/herself. For Durkheim someone with the human form raised by wolves in a cave would not be human. To be human is to be social. In essence this notion feeds into the left side of modern politics, where the right tends to believe it is all up to oneself and the left believes we are all in this together.

When Hegel praised the German state for being the greatest achievement up to that point in human history, he had in mind a huge collective of several million people that eventually became, with some notorious ups and downs, the modern German nation-state. In fact, the modern nation-state is the largest-scale collective ever known to humankind.

In essence we could see the collective as progressing through several stages, each next stage being at a larger level. Thus, we could say that the initial bonding together of two individuals is the smallest and earliest kind of collective, progressing up through blood-line collectives such as the family and extended family, then the tribe (or lodge?), then the geographic community (small at first) and, eventually, the nation-state. Some recent writings on poverty in the third world have even contemplated a collective that incorporates all of humanity. Was the United Nations an attempt at this? Probably not. Still, it would have seemed just as unlikely to 18th century philosophers that collectives at the nation-state level would ever come into being.

So, in the history of human development the successful collective has become larger and larger, eventually manifesting itself in the creation of about 200 nation-states. However, many of these nation-states are certainly not true collectives, if by a collective we mean a group of people, no matter how large or small, who are equally disposed to goodwill to all within the collective. Perhaps the ones that come closest are the modern northern European state such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden, where the development of a comprehensive welfare state is a concrete indication that a large majority of people in each of those nation-states really cares about the welfare of ones fellow citizens, be it the need for a decent income, decent housing, decent childcare, good education etc. At the other end of the spectrum we have so-called nation-states, where the collective does not extend beyond blood or tribal links. So-called nation-states such as Uganda, Kenya and Russia fit into this category, where all the good life chances go to members of that small collective of ruling elite. The current concern with the high level of corruption in China seems to point in the same direction. In the cases of Russia and China, this is particularly ironic since they went through a period of Communism, a creed that, theoretically, believes in a collectivity of the largest and most inclusive kind.

Of course all modern nation states came through periods of limited collectivity before becoming more all-inclusive and, it seems that the current discussion about growing material inequality in much of the post-industrial world is really a discussion about the breakdown in a broad sense of collectivities in all those territories.

An ongoing threat to the formation of any collective at the nation-state level is the tendency of the members to be split along “them and us”, lines where negative stereotypes seem to be easily bought into, be they about class, religious beliefs, ethnicity or immigrant/citizen status. My suspicion is the winding down of the welfare state has something to do with this.

So the question becomes, how do broad collectivities develop and, once developed, how are they maintained? I will attempt to deal with these questions in upcoming postings.