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WAYNE POTTS AND THE MANEUVER WAVES OF BIRDS
As another familiar example of the superorganism concept, consider schools of fish: when predators swim into a school, the fish dart quickly to the side in a coordinated way in order to clear a path through the middle. They move very fast in response to quite unexpected stimuli, yet they do not bump into each other. The same is true of flocks of birds. A whole flock can bank as one without the birds bumping into each other.
Recently, studies investigating the banking of large flocks of dunlins by American researcher Wayne Potts have been conducted. He filmed their maneuvers at a very rapid rate of exposure, so that he could later slow the process down and examine it frame by frame. When he did so, he found that the rate of propagation of what he calls the “maneuver wave” is extremely fast: about 20 milliseconds from bird to bird. This is much faster than the birds’ minimum reaction time to stimuli. He measured their startle reaction time using dunlins in the laboratory in dark or dim light. He set off photographic flashbulbs and measured how long it took the birds to react. He found that it took the individual birds about 80?100 milliseconds; that is, they reacted as individuals four to five times more slowly than the rate at which the maneuver wave moved from bird to bird. The banking maneuver could begin anywhere within the flock?at the front or back or at the side. It was usually initiated by a single bird or a small group of birds, and then propagated outwards much faster than could be explained by any simple system of visual cuing and response to stimuli.
THE COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOR OF HUMAN GROUPS
If one thinks of the flock as being coordinated by a morphic field and the “maneuver wave” as a wave in the morphic field, then this phenomenon is much easier to understand than it is when explained in terms of ordinary sensory physiology. The above examples illustrate a few of the areas in which actual empirical studies are possible ? areas which suggest the existence of group minds or group fields in the coordination of collective animal behavior. It has often been suggested that a similar phenomenon may be at work in human groups, especially in the behavior of crowds. A number of studies has been conducted by social psychologists on what they call “collective behavior,” which includes the behavior of crowds, football hooligans, rioting mobs, and lynching mobs, as well as rapidly spreading social phenomena such as fashions, fads, rumors, crazes, and jokes. All such phenomenon would fit readily into the concept of group morphic fields.
In interviews, athletes on successful teams commonly compare their teams to a composite organism where everybody fits in and knows where their teammates are going to be. The team behaves more like a single organism than like a composite of separate individuals. Through practice together, teams build up this response to each other; words such as empathy or sixth sense are often used to describe the feeling they share.
If we think of societies and social groups as being coordinated by morphic fields, then we realize that the groups themselves come together and dissolve as teams do ? but their fields are more enduring. We are in these fields virtually all the time: family fields, or national fields, or local fields, the fields of various groups to which we belong. We are contained within these larger collective patterns of organization much of the time but because they are always present, we cease to be aware of them. We take them for granted, just as we take the air we breathe for granted, because the air is also always present. However, if we are held under water for a while, we no longer take the air for granted; we quickly become conscious of our need for it! Similarly, people placed in solitary confinement quickly become aware of the importance of social interaction.
Many anthropologists have commented on an almost indefinable “something” which holds the members of the society together. French sociologist Emile Durkheim spoke of this as the “conscience collective” (in French, the word conscience means both conscience and consciousness). He believed that one of the major functions of the “conscience collective” was to maintain the cohesion of the social group. It behaved similarly to a group field, and many of the activities of the group consciousness were concerned with maintaining and stabilizing the continued existence of the group field itself.
MCDOUGALL’S GROUP MIND AND THE SHADOW
In the 1930s William McDougall, who wrote The Group Mind (1920/ 1972) and several other books on social psychology, theorized that a group mind existed which included all members of a society and which had its own thoughts, its own traditions, and its own memories. If we think of such a group mind as an aspect of the morphic field of the society, it would indeed have its own memory since all morphic fields have in?built memory through morphic resonance.
The problem with ideas like this one is that it is not possible yet to define t what the group mind is or how it could be measured. Given the positivistic mood of sociology which prevailed then (and now), McDougal’s concept of the group mind was not developed further. Traumatic social conditions then dampened any remaining receptivity to notions involving group forces. By the 1930s, the shadow side of collective consciousness had taken tangible form in Nazi Germany. Because this shadow side was all too real, most people were frightened of any concept suggesting group minds or group consciousness. Certainly we have all seen the shadow side of group consciousness only .too clearly in the last few decades. What we need to realize, however, is that there is much to be learned from thinking about the more positive side of group fields or group consciousness.
In more recent sociological and anthropological theory, a holistic approach to society has become quite common. In fact, compared with the biological and physical sciences which have been based on reductionist principles, a great deal of sociological and anthropological theory has taken a consistently holistic perspective. It was within this broader intellectual environment, characterized by Durkheim’s conscience collective and McDougall’s group mind, that Jung formulated his concept of the collective unconscious.
IS SOCIETY AN ORGANISM?
The idea that human society is an organism is extremely widespread; it is perhaps one of the most common metaphors extending throughout the history of Western thought. It exists in our language in phrases such as the body politic, head of state, arm of the law. These are organic metaphors which imply the unified, organic nature of society. The same notion is also common in religious metaphors, and is expressed in such descriptions of the Christian church as the mystical body of Christ. More specifically, Christ compared himself to the vine of which the people were the branches, again connoting an organic unity. Even in 17th?century political thought, which was far more atomistic in tone, philosopher Thomas Hobbes compared society to a leviathan, a great monster, using still another organic metaphor.
Although many of us still think of society as a form of collective, living organism, the earth is now considered to be dead. This wasn’t always so; in Latin, mater means mother and materia means matter. Thus, in the Indo-European languages, matter comes from the same root as mother. Unfortunately, since the 17th century, Mother Nature in Western consciousness has been turned into dead matter; the mother has become unconscious, only preserved as a dim memory in the word matter. Instead, it is the economy that has become alive. We speak of a growing economy which can be sick or healthy, and which goes through cycles. Economies have all the attributes of giant living organisms, with an autonomy which even politicians, businessmen and bankers cannot control. The economy has become a self?regulating, self organizing system, very much alive in a supposedly dead world. Thus the economy has come to life at the expense of the earth, and that is one of the problems with which many people are currently grappling.
The concept of morphic fields containing in?built memory helps to explain many features of society: for example, there are traditions, customs, and manners which enable societies to retain their organizing principles ? their autonomy, pattern, structure, and organization ? even though there is a continuous turnover of individuals through the cycles of birth and death. This is similar to the way in which the morphogenetic field of the human being coordinates the entire body even though the cells and tissues within the body are continuously changing.
RITUALS: SPIRITUAL AND SECULAR
There are certain contexts in which social memory not only becomes conscious but is actually invoked in all societies; this is through ritual. Rituals are found in all societies all over the world, both in cultural and religious contexts. For example, in our own society the Jewish feast of Passover recalls the dreadful visitation of death throughout Egypt when all the first?born were killed, except the first born of the Jews who were protected by the ritual blood of sacrificial lambs smeared on the doorways of Jewish houses. In the Christian Mass, the ritual of Holy Communion, in which Christians drink the blood and eat the body of Jesus ? refers back to the primal Last Supper when the Passover feast was transformed and Jesus himself became the sacrificial victim.
In every society there are also hundreds of social and cultural rituals. In America, there is the national custom of the Thanksgiving dinner which commemorates the first Thanksgiving dinner offered by Pilgrims upon their safe settlement in New England. We also have many minor rituals of everyday life, such as the rituals of greeting and parting. Saying good?bye, for example, originally meant “God be with you.” When we say good?bye, we give a ritualized blessing which retains some of the power of the original ritual, even though most people are no longer conscious of its original meaning. Similar ritual acts on large and small scales permeate even our modern “enlightened” societies.
What do people think they’re doing in rituals? In major rituals, the ritual is usually associated with a story which refers back to a frequently forgotten primal event. For example, Guy Fawkes night is a secular ritual in England: every November 5th, bonfires are lit all over England, fireworks are set off, and effigies are burned over the bonfires. In this case, the ostensible story concerns a man named Guy Fawkes, one of the Roman Catholic conspirators in the so called “Gunpowder Plot” who tried to blow up the House of Parliament in the 17th century.
However, lying behind that supposed explanation is a much older ritual: the Celtic festival of the dead. On November 1st, the ancient Celtic pre-Christian festival of the dead was celebrated whereby the old year was burned in effigy, as effigies are burned on Guy Fawkes day. During this period, it was believed that there was a “crack in time” when the living and the dead, the past, the present, and the future all came together. The eve of the festival of the dead was Halloween, when the spirits and ghosts came out and the dead walked again. Similarly, in the Christian calendar, November 1st is “All Saints Day” and November 2nd is “All Souls Day,” when the souls of the departed are commemorated and requiem masses are said in churches even today. So, behind our present?day celebrations lay a much older ritual background: a pattern behind a pattern. Many of these ancient rituals are alive and well in the modern world.
