Moxon, Cavendish

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IS THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP A NARCOTICINDULGENCE?THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY AND HUMAN GROUPSBY CAVENDISH MOXONFELLOWSHIP is a magic word today. In a democratic coun-try it seems the natural way of personal salvation and reform.Catholics, under the influence of the fellowship idea, are constantlyinsisting on obedience to the Church, the inherent powers of thehierarchy, the corporate life and social witness of Christians, theBody of Christ and the Fellowship of the Mystery.Protestants are inspired by the belief in fellowship to makestrenuous efforts to secure a reunion of all Christians in one fold.The numerous ecclesiastical fellowships for Church reform and theundenominational societies for moral, social, and political purposes,are a witness to men's growing faith in the power of co-operationto advance the cause of truth and goodness. Even liberal church-men have so far forsaken their wonted method of individual influ-ence as to form unions to advance their aims. Metaphysicians likeJosiah Royce make the Beloved Community the object of Christianfaith and the center of Christian life. Sociologists like Durkheimfind in the fellowship of the clan or group both the primitive andthe present meaning of God. Unanimist poets like Jules Romainstell us that "the men who henceforth can draw the souls of groupsto converge within themselves will give forth the coming dream."It is true that M. Romains has not yet found a group that is fullydivine. "None." he declares, "has had a real consciousness." Buthe has a confident hope that the day will come when a group shallverily exist as a soul. "On that day," he believes, "there will be anew god upon earth." ^^ The Modern Churchman, VHI, p. 321.22 THE OPEN COURTSince the majority of mankind have a strong- desire for thepower that comes from sympathetic association, it is important tostudy the behavior of men in groups in order that this power maybe consciously directed towards socially valuable ends. The pre-Freudian psychologists observed the inevitable levelling of the indi-viduals who form a fellowship. It was well known that the idiosyn-crasies of impulse are to some extent inhibited by the behavior ofthe group as a whole. The French student of society, M. Tarde,declared, "One is not born like others, one becomes so" by livingin their society. A fellowship always involves imitation, and aimsat the propagation of general ideas and collective values. Thereis much imitation and social suggestion in the loosely-knit societyof a city or nation ; the gregarious forces are more active in a reli-gious or moral fellowship which is of one heart and mind ; thereis an almost overwhelming degree of social pressure upon the indi-vidual in a closely packed gathering. In the crude and violentbehavior of the revival meeting we can clearly see the forces thatare hidden behind the more repressed behavior in orderly religiousworship.By his recent work on Group Psychology. Freud has made pos-sible a deeper insight into the satisfactions of fellowship by tracingthe influence of unconscious desires within the group. Freud hasdiscovered that the infantile desires for parental protection, provi-dential love, and irresponsible, careless behavior are all satisfied bylife in a group. When the conscious individual will is relaxed inobedience to the suggestive force of the group leader, the hiddendesires can rise from the depths and combine with similar impulsesin the other members in such a way as to issue in nonrational acts.The crowd then regresses from the relatively conscious control ofadult individuality to the unconscious control of childish desire.The home was the infantile paradise in the days before self-reliancewas necessary. Therefore the home forms the model for all subse-quent group life. In the home the parent is loved and worshippedby the infant, who agrees to share the parental affection with theother children in his family, when he learns that it is impossible toexclude his rivals. Moreover, home life was the delightful timeof unmoral indulgence of pleasant desires before the period of moralcontrol. The child was content to be economically and morally de-pendent on the elders who protected it from attacks of strangersor enemies. The first love was the love for the mother and thefather ; there was no original instinct of sympathy for the familyIS THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP A NARCOTIC INDULGENCE? 23form of the human herd. Only 'later appears the love for brothersand sisters, and the repression of rivalry and envious hate. Theorganized group regresses in its behavior to the family situation.The sympathetic bond of the members to the leader and to oneanother is largely dominated by the emergence of infantile lovewithin the .group. The escape of infantile affects is made easierby the prestige of the group and by the suggestive power of itsleaders.The exact nature of this suggestive force had long been in debate,until Freud and Ferenczi discovered its unconscious roots in thechild-parent relation. The substitute for the father or motherauthority appears not only in the hypnotist and the faith healer, butalso in the crowd leader and tn.e hero. The hvpnotized patient andthe obedient crowd reanimate their infariiJc attitude of depend-ence.. It is therefore significant that both hvpnotists and popularorators make use of methods that recall the parental authority ofinfancy. The hypnotist and the orator may use the masterful methodthat suggests the father or the ouiet persuasion of the mother inorder to gain the end desired. Since the dominence of the infantileunconscious depends on the suppression of conscious control, hyp-notists and orators use repetitions of sights or sounds and gesturesthat narrow the attention and the rational activity. Suggestion,therefore works most powerf'illy when a dense crowd has a leader,or when a meeting of disciples is called for a definite purpose. Move-ment of body and distraction of mind both hinder the process. Iri.c only when the unconscious is wholly free that suggestion may bedirect and commands may be plainly made. So long as the cof-scious will retains some power of censorship over the unconsciousand the temporarily submerged part of the self, the suggestions mustbe indirectly made in order to be successful. The child obeys theparental will so long as it can identify its own will with the com-mands of the elder. And this identification depends on the child'sconfidence in the elder's love. The ruthless assertion of authorityon the part of a leader, by destroying the childish confidence in hislove, calls forth a stubborn resistance to his alien will which nowseems like a hostile attack upon the self. In any but the mostecstatically excited meeting, the successful speaker or preacher prac-tises the indirect method of suggestion. By subtly concealing hiswill to suggest certain feelings, ideas, or acts, he eludes the resist-ance of his hearers.24 THE OPEN COURTThe group and the gathering of men, in proportion to their psy-chological unity, behave in a way that is foreign to the normal lifeof their members in isolation. The crowd is anonymous and there-fore irresponsible. When thus relieved from the checks of prudenceand fear, the members of a group are capable of performing heroicor criminal deeds that they dare not do without a collective stimulus.The fellowship may indeed behave better than its units apart, butit usually behaves worse than its members at their best. This isnatural, since the unity of the group involves some suppression ofthe inventive originality and the inspired individuality of its mem-bers. M. Gustave le Bon is probably right in saying that the crowd(in a psychological sense) is always inferior in ideas to some, atleast, of its members, though it may be superior in the intensity ofits feeling and the power of asserting its will. M. Anatole Franceis true to history and psychology when he allows M. Gamelin, thetender-hearted and kind lover and friend, to be led by the suggestionof the French Revolution to advocate cruel acts of mercilessbutchery.In the primitive tribes of Australian aborigines the power andneed of fellowship to foster a social and religious consciousness ismost clearly seen. The normal life of nomadic and rustic mentends to destroy tribal unity. Hence their need of periodical gath-erings of tribes and clans. At these festivals the normal methodsof suggestion as practised in Christian churches are insufficientto rouse the dormant social sense of the members. The tribesmenmust be roused to a frenzy of feeling and action in order to realizetheir social unity as the mystical body of their Totem. Without thisstrong social suggestion by means of fellowship, the tribal cohesioncould not survive the long periods of separate family life and theprimitive tendency to narcissistic isolation.^From the lowly religion of these primitive men to the sacramen-tal gatherings of Christian worship, the fellowship has played animportant part in preserving and propagating tlie ideals which theinspired individual has created. Churches and prophe'.^. slates andreformers are consequently in perpetual confll; t. Th- group everseeks to keep the gains mankind has already won : the creative indi-vidual alone can win new gains for the world. The inevitable ten-sion between these two factors of history provde; the material forendless tragedy and heroism. At the dawn of history the groups arestrong and the individuals weak. The dominant social suggestion2 Roheim, Imagi, VIII, p. 254.IS THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP A NARCOTIC INDULGENCE? 25almost excludes individual initiative, variety, and progress. In themiddle ages, when ecclesiasticism was dominant, men readily caughtthe contagion of the Crusades. Even children could not resist theimpulse to make a pilgrimage. When Stephen the shepherd boy ofCloyes in 1212 began a children's crusade, neither the edicts ofauthorities nor the threats of parents could counter the strong sug-gestion. Some children who were forcibly detained at home pinedaway and died because they could not respond to the social pressurewhich they regarded as a call of conscience to follow their leader.The Reformation of the sixteenth century had to reckon withthe awakening of individuality caused by the Renaissance. Groupsand their leaders henceforth found it more difficult to exercise abso-lute power over the individual. The increasing use of consciousjudgment reduced the sugestive power of established societies andlimited.the influence of their leaders. As a consequence, the modernworld is less subject to the appalling psychical epidemics thatoccurred in the middle ages—the outbreaks of asceticism and flagel-lation, pilgrimages and crusades, and the hunting of witches anddemons.The scientists and modernists of the present day have gone astep beyond the truth seekers of the Renaissance in their consciousrebellion against the domination of groups and the inadequate par-ent-substitutes at their head. The spread of scientific education willpromote the growth of mental and moral adults : the increase of psy-chically mature persons will, in its turn, reduce the power of crowdsto determine the behavior of infantile men. The next step towardsself-reliance and conscious progress will come when the Freudianpsychology has been applied to the home and school education ofthe people. At present the powerful unconscious forces in humangroups tend towards fickle and impulsive behavior with little sus-tained purpose and reasonable will. The crowd or meeting enor-mously increases the suggestibility of the members present. Theunanimous show of. hands in a packed meeting may but express thedominating will of a single leader. The power of the group overa rational mind is seen in the case of a young American sceptic whowas led by hostile curiosity to join the circle of an open-air revivalmeeting. Neither his armory of doubts nor his force of will couldresist the contagious excitement. The young scofifer soon began tobeat his breast and to express the common religious emotion of theworshippers.26 THE OPEN COURTA curious result of group feeling, unchecked by critical individ-ual reason and will, is the collective vision of hallucination, whichis occasionally recorded at times of religious excitement or collec-tive strain. A notable instance of this was the soldiers' vision ofthe angels at the battle of Mons. Indeed the contagion of a visionor audition is such that the evidence of five hundred witnesses is notnecessarily stronger than the evidence of one. Collective emotionis at the mercy of the primitive unconscious mind, and always seekspleasure in the old paths and familiar fancies. The fellowship there-fore tends to be intolerant of differences, complexities, and novel-ties. Ideas must be simple and familiar in order to please the groupwhich prefers images or symbolic acts. Even in the French Revo-lution we see the tendency of the group to become a cult with agoddess, with a belief in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and withleaders to increase men's faith, to sustain their hope, and to destroythe enemies of the people. The explicitly religious fellowshipexhibits the power of suggestion at its height. In a large or ancientsociety the dogmatic forms, ascetic disciplines, and symbolic ritestend to fix the attention, to control the thought, and to rule the will.Are we then to conclude that the practice of fellowship in groupsis condemned by psychology as unworthy of a place in civilized life?Do the facts drive us to an exclusive individualism? Certainly not.Society is indispensable for the making of men. Life without humanfellowship is a contradiction in terms. Social intercourse is anessential means to individual growth in knowledge and power. Butpsychology has proved the practice of fellowship to be like alcoholin its narcotic effects upon the highest powers of conscious person-ality. Consequently fellowship must not be indulged in blindly lestit strangle initiative and weaken resistance to the infantile part ofthe self that is stimidated by the group.Children are ready to accept almost any suggestion, and theyretain their infantile impressions for life. Children should there-fore be given more fellowship with children than with adults inorder to develop their self-expression and will power. The aim ofchildish fellowship should be to prevent precocious development andover stimulation of the senses of the imagination. After the home,school is the chief formative fellowship for children. Yet* theschool, instead of educating children to resist the crushing domina-tion of the group, often tends to produce a life-long habit of uncriti-cal subjection and dependence. As if the boy's fear of his fellowswas not already strong enough, Mr. Cecil Rhodes made popularityIS THE PRACTICE OF FELLOWSHIP ANARCOTIC INDULGENCE ? 27a recommendation for his scholarships. In view of the atrocitiesthat have been produced by esprit de corps, it is perilous to drill thechildren into unconscious conformity with group conduct as if ithad divine authority.With regard to the fellowship of adults. No rule can be madeto apply to all alike, because all differ in mental age and symbolicneed. Tlie person who is naturally inclined to independent activityis in danger of ignoring the traditional values of fellowship. Sucha man does well to come down from his lonely height at times, likeNietzsche's Zarathustra and sink himself in fellowship. He willsoon prove his power to emerge and rise again in full possession ofhis soul. But fellowship is like a dangerous drug to the person whois naturally passive and obedient. The fre'quent indulgence in theenervating emotions of group gatherings uses the energy that isneeded for a strong grasp of the real world and its tasks.From this brief review of the psychological facts about fellow-ship we conclude that group emotion tends to inhibit the action ofthe conscious will, to let loose primitive impulses, and to discour-age intellectual activity. The group has no higher soul than thepsychically adult individual in its midst. Indeed the unity of thefellowship tends to an artificial suppression of personal excellenceto the average level of traditional thought, conventional feeling, andprimitive impulse. No fellowship as a whole ever makes a dis-covery or a moral advance. Not even humanity with a capital Hcan be regarded as essentially superior to the best individualsit contains. The development of the race depends on a healthytension between groups and their members. No known group, nationor race is a perfect embodiment of human life. Mankind is in themaking, and the growing points are the finest specimens of men andwomen at a given moment. The practice of fellowship is only jus-tified insofar as it contributes to the development of mental andmoral adulthood, and involves no sacrifice of the highest persons tothe lowly passions of the mob. Groups that are formed to satisfythe temporary desires of men dissolve when these desires are satis-fied. Uniformity means death : variety and schism are the signsof life. A rigidly organized world-state might lead to racial decay.The clearest indication of vigorous life is man's creative will tobreak up and remake his fellowships in order to enrich his personallife and to contribute to racial development.

Is the Practice of Fellowship a Narcotic Indulgence?

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Is the Practice of Fellowship a Narcotic Indulgence?

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