The result of this requirement, working alongside of the depersonalizing
tendency just mentioned, has been to make the characteristic form of
modern organization what I may call the nucleated group, a group, that
is, composed of a large number of members who put very little of
themselves into it, along with a few, or perhaps only one, who enlist
the main part of their personality. This gives a happy union of breadth
and concentration, and if one will reflect upon the associations to
which he belongs he will find, I imagine, that nearly all are conducted
in this way. It is the only way to meet the demand for multifarious
co-operation and specialization which modern life makes.
It is worth noting that the individual is nucleated as well as the
group. That is, he spreads his life out over many groups, but yet
concentrates his central personality upon two or three. A teacher, for
example, may own stock in several companies and belong to a number of
scientific, philanthropic and recreative associations, but after all he
lives mainly in his teaching and his family.
This concentration is agreeable to human nature, which craves devotion
to a cause. Life is energized by men throwing themselves into some one
of its innumerable purposes, making themselves the blazing head of that
particular comet while the rest of us gleam palely in the tail. In this
way scientific theories, educational reforms, and business
“propositions” are promoted with a personal ardor which reacts with
antagonism to whatever opposes its object.
It might seem that patriotism must play a diminishing part in modern
life, under the principle that personality is less and less embraced in
any one group, even though that group be the nation. There is reason to
think, however, that the need of devotion to a whole and of
self-abandonment, at times, to some sort of mass enthusiasm, is a trait
of human nature too strong to be overcome by the growing complexity of
life. Like the love of the sexes, it is something elemental, without
which life is felt to be baffled and incomplete. There is a deep need to
merge the “I” in a “We,” some vast “We,” on which one may float as on a
flood of larger life. The ordinary ambitions and specialties do not
satisfy this need, which is certainly a large part of the real religion
of mankind.
Collective emotion of this sort is always smouldering within us, and may
at any time break forth and melt into some kind of a whole the
differentiations of which our life appears to consist. It evidently does
so in times of warlike excitement, and may well give rise to other forms
of enthusiasm which we cannot now foresee. It produced the Crusades in
the past, and may produce future movements equally remote from our
recent experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account