Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War

Trotter, Wilfred 1921. Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd.

Sociology has, of course, often been described as social psychology and has been regarded as differing from ordinary psychology in being [|] concerned with those forms of mental activity which man displays in his social relations, the assumption being made that society brings to light a special series of mental aptitudes with which ordinary psychology, dealing as it does essentially, with the individual, is not mainly concerned. (Trotter 1921: 11-12)

A reminder that social psychology is still about mental phenomena, applied on special material, "man in society or associated man" (ibid, 11).

It is suggested here that the sense of the [|] unimaginable complexity and variability of human affairs is derived less than is generally supposed from direct observation and more from this second factor of introspectual interpretation which may be called a kind of anthropomorphism. A reaction against this in human psychology is no less necessary therefore than was in comparative psychology the similar movements the extremer developments of which are associated with the names of Bethe, Beer, Uexküll and Nuel. (Trotter 1921: 13-14)

The unexpected Uexküll.

Many attempts have been made to explain the behaviour of man as dictated by instinct. He is, in fact, moved by the promptings of such obvious instincts as self-preservation, nutrition, and sex enough to render the enterprise hopeful and its early spoils enticing. So much can be easily be generalized under these three impulses that the temptation to declare that all human behaviour could be resumed under them was irresistible. These early triumphs of materialism soon, however, began to be troubled by doubt. Man, in spite of his obvious duty to the contrary, would continue so often not to preserve himself, not to nourish himself and to prove resistant to the blandishments of sex, that the attempt to squeeze his behaviour into these three categories began to involve an increasingly obvious and finally intolerable amount of pushing and pulling, as well as so much pretence that he was altogether "in," [|] when, quite plainly, so large a part of him remained "out," that the enterprise had to be given up, and it was once more discovered that man escaped and must always escape any complete generalization by science. (Trotter 1921: 16-17)

Harkening back to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on man's ability to act contrary to his self-interests.

But little examination will show that the animals whose conduct it is difficult to generalize under the three primitive instinctive categories are gregarious. If then it can be shown that gregariousness is of a biological significance approaching in importance that of the other instincts, we may expect to find in it the source of these anomalies of conduct, and if we can also show [|] that man is gregarious, we may look to it for the definition of the unknown "x" which might account for the complexity of human behaviour. (Trotter 1921: 17-18)

Hence the fourth, social, instinct.

One of the most familiar attitudes was that which regarded the social instinct as a late development. The family was looked upon as the primitive unit; from it developed the tribe, and by the spread of family feeling to the tribe the social instinct arose. It is interesting that the psychological attack upon this position has been anticipated by sociologists and anthropologists, and that it is already being recognized that an undifferentiated horde rather than the family must be regarded as the primitive basis of human society. (Trotter 1921: 21)

Freud (1922), too, concludes that the primal horde was probably more important than the tribe.

The case for the primitiveness of the social habit would seem to be still further strengthened by a consideration of such widely aberrant developments as speech and the æsthetic activities, but a discussion of them here would involve an unnecessary indulgence of biological speculation. (Trotter 1921: 23)

With regard to the similarities between the phatic and the aesthetic functions, it would have been of great help if this "aberration" was more fleshed out.

It is of course clear that no complete review of all that has been said concerning a conception so familiar can be attempted here, and, even if it were possible, it would not be a profitable enterprise, as the great bulk of writers have not seen in the idea anything to justify a fundamental examination of it. What will be done here, therefore, will be to mention a few representative writers who have dealt with the subject, and to give in a summary way the characteristic features of their exposition. (Trotter 1921: 23)

Phraseology.

For example may be mentioned the famous antithesis of the "cosmical" and the "ethical" processes expounded in Huxley's Romanes Lectures. It was quite definitely indicated by Pearson that the so-called ethical process, the appearance, that is to say, of altruism, is to be regarded as a directly instinctive product of gregariousness, and as natural, therefore, as any other instinct. (Trotter 1921: 24)

The appearance of altruism is another topic subsumed under the more obvious issues involved in phatic communion. It surfaces most obviously in "the communion of food".

"This [...] if it be not an instinct, is at least the human homologue of animal instinct, and served the same purpose after the instincts had chiefly disappeared, and when the egotistic reason would otherwise have rapidly carried the race to destruction in its mad pursuit of pleasure for its own sake." (Ward 1903: 134) (Trotter 1921: 25)

Quoted from Lester Ward's Pure Sociology (1903).

That gregariousness has to be considered amongst [|] the factors shaping the tendencies of the human mind has long been recognized by the more empirical psychologists. In the main, however, it has been regarded as a quality perceptible only in the characteristics of actual crowds - that is to say, assemblies of persons being and acting in association. This conception has served to evoke a certain amount of valuable work in the observation of the behaviour of crowds. (Trotter 1921: 25-26)

With footnoted reference, of course, to Gustave Le Bon's The Growd.

There is, however, one exception, in the case of the work of Boris Sidis. In a book entitled "The Psychology of Suggestion" he has described certain psychical qualities as necessarily associated with the social habit in the individual as in the crowd. His position, therefore, demands some discussion. The fundamental element in it is the conception of the normal existence in the mind of a subconscious self. This subconscious or subwaking self is regarded as embodying the "lower" and more obviously brutal qualities of man. It is irrational, imitative, credulous, cowardly, cruel, and lacks all individuality, will, and self-control. This personality takes the place of the normal personality during hypnosis and when the individual is one of an active crowd, as, for example, in riots, panics, lynchings, revivals, and so forth. (Trotter 1921: 26)

Never heard of it, though the argument is fully compatible with Freud's generalities about crowds.

In interpreting into mental terms the consequences of gregariousness, we may conveniently begin with the simplest. The conscious individual will feel an unanalysable primary sense of comfort in the actual presence of his fellows, and a similar sense of discomfort in their absence. It will be obvious truth to him that it is not good for the man to be alone. Loneliness will be a real terror, insurmountable by reason. (Trotter 1921: 31)

The full statement from which "the strange and unpleasant tension" appears to be abstracted.

It would seem that the obstacles to rational thought which have been pointed out in the foregoing discussion have received much less attention than should have been directed towards them. To maintain an attitude of mind which could be called scientific in any complete sense, it is of cardinal importance to recognize that belief of affirmations sanctioned by the herd is a normal mechanism of the human mind, and goes on however much such affirmations may be opposed by evidence, that reason cannot enforce belief against herd suggestion, and finally that totally false opinions may appear to be holder of them to possess all the characters of rationally verifiable truth, and may be justified by secondary processes of rationalization which it may be impossible directly to combat by argument. (Trotter 1921: 39)

Quite possibly the source of "emphasis on affirmation and consent". The preceding discussion bears some likeness to the later concept of cognitive dissonance and directly calls forth "rationalization", one of the means for reducing cognitive dissonance.

It is obvious that when free communication is possible by speech, the expressed approval or disapproval of the herd will acquire the qualities of identity or dissociation from the herd respectively. To know that he is doing what would arouse the disapproval of the herd will bring to the individual the same profound sense of discomfort which would accompany actual physical separation, while to know that he is doing what the herd would approve will give him the sense of rightness, of gusto, and of stimulus which would accompany physical presence in the herd and response to its mandates. In both cases it is clear that no actual expression by the herd is necessary to arouse the appropriate feelings, which would come from within and have, in fact, the qualities which are recognized in the dictates of conscience. Conscience, then, and the feelings of guilt and of duty are the peculiar possessions of the gregarious animal. (Trotter 1921: 40)

Something along the lines of Adam Smith's omniscient observer. The role of speech is here somewhat underpronounced. Does the "herd" first express its approval and disapproval, and the agent store these in his mind, or are they more like imagined responses? In the latter case it could be tied in with Mead's contemporaneous discussion of the generalized other, in the former with the foregoing discussion of tradition and Clay's definition of custom.

With the social animal controlled by herd instinct it is not the actual deed which is instinctively done, but the order to do it which is instinctively obeyed. The deed, being ordained from without, may actually be unpleasant, and so be resisted from the individual side and yet be forced instinctively into execution. (Trotter 1921: 48)

The gregarious instinct, thus, is distinct from other instincts. Though one could argue that self-preservation, nutrition, and sex are not absolutely and at all times pleasant (think of the anorexic's aversion to food, the celibate's aversion to sex, and the recent case of a man on death row hanging himself because his due date was constantly delayed).

Thus far we have seen that the conflict between herd suggestion and experience is associated with the appearance of the great mental type which is commonly called normal. Whether or not it is in fact to be regarded as such is comparatively unimportant and obviously a question of statistics; what is, however, of an importance impossible to exaggerate is the fact that in this type of mind personal satisfactoriness or adequacy, or, as we may call it, mental comfort, is attained at the cost of an attitude towards experience which greatly affects the value to the species of the activities of minds of this type. This mental stability, then, is to be regarded as, in certain important directions, a loss; and the nature of the loss resides in a limitation of outlook, a relative intolerance of the new in thought, and a consequent narrowing of the range of facts over which satisfactory intellectual activity is possible. We may, therefore, for convenience, refer to this type as the resistive, a name which serves as a reminder of the exceedingly important fact that, [|] however "normal" the type may be, it is one which falls far short of the possibilities of the human mind. (Trotter 1921: 55-56)

The normal mental type is resistant to new information. In this light, Malinowski didn't necessarily have to regard the peoples he spoke about as unintelligent, merely "normal".

When the twenty years just past come to be looked back upon from the distant future, it is probable that their chief claim to interest will be that they saw the birth of the science of abnormal psychology. (Trotter 1921: 56)

Nope. That's not my chief aim and I associate abnormal psychology with William James' British contemporaries.

The success and extent of such development clearly depend on the relation of two series of activities in the individual which may in the most general way be described as the capacity for varied reaction and the capacity for communication. The process going on in the satisfactorily developing gregarious animal is the moulding of the varied reactions of the individual into functions beneficial to him only indirectly through the welfare of the new unit - the herd. (Trotter 1921: 61)

The capacity for varied reaction is the exact opposite of mechanization.

What I have called the primitive method of psychological inquiry is also the obvious and natural one. It takes man as it finds him, accepts his mind for what it professes to be, and examines into its processes by introspection of a direct and simple kind. It is necessarily subject to the conditions that the object of study is also the medium through which the observations are made, and that there is no objective standard by which the accuracy of transmission through this medium can be estimated and corrected. (Trotter 1921: 68)

Like Ruesch says, intrapersonal communication on its own has no means of reality check.

In the two earlier essays of this book I attempted to show that the essential specific characteristic of the mind of the gregarious animal is this very capacity to confer upon herd opinion the psychical energy of instinct. (Trotter 1921: 82)

It may be argued that this is exactly what Malinowski performs with regard to the opinion of social intercourse shared throughout the Western world.

The actual amount of mental activity which accompanies an instinctive process is very variable; it may be quite small, and then the subject of it is reduced to a mere automaton, possesed, as we say, by an ungovernable passion such as panic, lust, or rage; it may be quite large, and sometimes the subject, deceived by his own rationalizations and suppressions, may suppose himself to be a fully rational being in undisputed possession of free will and the mastery of his fate at the very moment when he is showing himself to be a mere puppet dancing to the strings which Nature, unimpressed by his valiant airs, relentlessly and impassively pulls. (Trotter 1921: 95)

Or, in the extreme, "nearly the whole of the practical life of man is, has been, and, for an indefinite time to come, threats to be, transacted by an unconscious force or agent, - that we have been puppets, not personal agents - dupes as well as puppets - and, in view of the prevalence of wretchedness in human life, victims" (Clay 1882).

Once started, however imperfectly, the new habit will have a natural tendency to progress towards fuller forms of sociality by reason of special selective forces which it inevitably sets going. The fact that it is valuble to the species in which it develops even in its most larval forms, [|] combined with its tendency to progress, no doubt accounts for the wonderful series of all degrees of gregariousness which the field of natural history presents. (Trotter 1921: 102-103)

Gregariousness in nature. Something De Laguna and La Barre develop further, mostly towards other primates with regard to vocalizations.

I have pointed out elsewhere that the fundamental biological meaning of gregariousness is that it allows of an indefinite enlargement of the unit upon which the undifferentiated influence of natural selection is allowed to act, so that the individual merged in the larger unit is shielded from the immediate effects of natural selection and is exposed directly only to the special form of selection which obtains within the new unit. (Trotter 1921: 103)

This jibes with the "domestication" of the human animal La Barre speaks of as culture, and possibly Nietzsche on society (concerning asceticism in Morals).

In essence the significance of the passage from the solitary to the gregarious seems to be closely similar to that of the passage from the unicellular to the multicellular organism - an enlargement of the unit exposed to natural selection, a shielding of the individual cell from that pressure, an endowment of it with freedom to vary and specialize in safety. (Trotter 1921: 103)

Organicism. Also, "Ages of Leisure" (Lloyd 1922) got me thinking if the 21st century might not fulfil the expectations of a century ago, of futuristic teleautomatics doing humanity's work and giving the human species freedom from physical toil. Will the coming era see more people like me who like a nearly aescetic life, lived for the purpose of specializing in something very minute? Will there be a time when most adults are not only literate but published and self-publishing authors? Is this science prosumption?

The varying degrees to which the social habit has developed among different animals provide a very interesting branch of study. The class of insects is remarkable in furnishing an almost inexhaustible variety of stages to which the instinct is developed. Of these that reached by the humble bee, with its small, weak families, is a familiar example of a low grade; that of the wasp, with its colonies large and strong, but unable to survive the winter, is another of more developed type; while that of the honey bee represents a very high grade of development in which the instinct seems to have completed its cycle and yielded to the hive the maximum advantages of which it is capable. In the honey bee, then, the social instinct may be said to be complete. (Trotter 1921: 104)

Social habit and social instinct are the terms by which this discussion is preceded in Mind and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society the latter decades of the 19th century. The honey bee has complete social instinct because it's a mindless drone, so to say. This discussion might turn productive in discussing the mechanization, routinization or fossilization of communicative signs in both animal and man (e.g. Darwin and his Expressions).

The analogy is helpful in the consideration of the mechanisms brought into play by the social habit. The community of the honey bee bears a close resemblance to the body of a complex animal. The capacity for actual structural specialization of the individuals in the interests of the hive has been remarkable and has gone far, while at the same time co-ordination has been stringently enforced, so that each individual is actually absorbed into the community, expends all its activities therein, and when excluded from it is almost as helpless as a part of the naked flesh of an animal detached from its body. (Trotter 1921: 105)

More on the Leviathan.

Nevertheless, it is not altogether valueless as a hint of what social unity might effect in an animal of larger mental life. There can be little doubt that the perfection to which the communal life of the bee has attained is dependent on the very smallness of the mental development of which the individuals are capable. Their capacity to assimilate experience is necessarily from their structure, and is known by experience to be, small and their path is marked out so plainly by actual physical modifications that the almost miraculous absorption of the worker in the hive is after all perhaps natural enough. If she were able to assimilate general experience on a larger scale, to react freely and appropriately to stimuli external to the hive, there can be little doubt that the community would show a less concentrated efficiency than it does to-day. The standard miracle of the bee - her sensitiveness to the voice of the hive and her capacity to communicate with her fellows - would undoubtedly be less marvellously perfect if she were not at the same time deaf to all other voices. (Trotter 1921: 107)

Social union (Spencer). Convivial gregariousness (Malinowski). With the assimilation of experience, we're reaching something like a collective Umwelt, or group mind, in the hive - brought about by the bee's system of communication (dance, here "voice"). Assimilation, though, likens to central processing in Ruesch's scheme; it's a question about whether the hive can "think" or, to parrot N. Tesla on self-driving cars, perform something analogous to judgment (Ruesch's evaluation).

Among the mammalia other than man and possibly apes and monkeys, gregariousness is found in two broadly distinguishable types according to the function it subseres. It may be either protective as in the sheep, the deer, the ox, and the horse, or aggressive as in the wolf and allied animals. (Trotter 1921: 108)

These grand distinctions are exactly what I'm after. Phatics counterbalanced by minus-phatics.

The quite fundamental characteristic of the social mammal, as of the bee, is sensitiveness to the voice of his fellows. He must have the capacity to react fatally and without hesitation to an impression coming to him from the herd, and he must react in a totally different way to impressions coming to him from without. In the presence of danger his first motion must be, not to fly or to attack as the case may be, but to notify the herd. This characteristic is beautifully demonstrated in the low growl of a dog will give at the approach of a stranger. This is obviously in no way part of the dog's programme of attack upon his enemy - when his object is intimidation he bursts into barking - but his first duty is to put the pack on its guard. Similarly the start of the sheep is a notification and precedes any motion of flight. (Trotter 1921: 108-109)

This here is the original "the stranger"; not the Dave Chapelle skit on Lil Jon but the case of reacting to the approach of a stranger. This sensitiveness to the voice one's fellows is transformed in Malinowski's essay into the border separating speech communities: whether the stranger speaks the same language as you and responds properly to customary formulae of greeting and approach. In Freud the issue is far too psychoanalysed, as if trying to rationalize why the company of a stranger is not as easy as the company of fellows. The "guard" calls forth association with "being on guard" in unfamiliar company and "letting one's guard down" around strangers; and "notification" calls forth acknowledgment and propitiation (also, for some reason, the case of every person in an enclosed social setting giving a quick glance to register newcomers, as when entering a bar, for example).

In order that the individual shall be sensitive in a special degree to the voice of the herd, he must have developed in him an infallible capacity for recognizing his fellow-members. In the low mammalia this seems almost exclusively a function of the sense of smell, as is natural enough since that sense is as a general rule highly developed in them. The domestic dog shows admirably the importance of the function of recognition in his species. Comparatively few recognize even their masters at any distance by sight or sound, while obviously with their fellows they are practically dependent on smell. The extent to which the ceremonial of recognition has developed in the dog is, of course, very familiar to every one. It shows unmistakable evidence of the rudiments of social organization, and is not the less illuminating to the student of human society for having a bodily orientation and technique which at first sight obscures its resemblance to similar, and it is supposed more dignified, mechanisms in man. (Trotter 1921: 109)

Ah! He is talking of sensations of bodily attributes, such as "the bad odour and flavour which a disordered digestion sometimes occasions" (Clay 1882: 6). The outcome is a rather rude comparison: human formulae of greeting and approach are no less natural than dogs sniffing each others' buttholes. The difference lies in our recognizing members of our social groups by a variety of semiotic means, including sight, sound, and even tactile interactions (when secret hand-shakes are involved).

Among qualities of restrictive specialization are inability to live satisfactorily apart from the herd or some substitute for it, the liability to loneliness, a dependence on leadership, custom, and tradition, a [|] credulity towards the dogmas of the herd and an unbelief towards external experience, a standard of conduct no longer determined by personal needs but influenced by a power outside the ego - a conscience, in fact, and a sense of sin - a weakness of personal initiative and a distrust of its promptings. Expansive specialization, on the other hand, gives the gregarious animal the sense of power and security in the herd, the capacity to respond to the call of the herd with a maximum output of energy and endurance, a deep-seated mental satisfaction in unity with the herd, and a solution in it of personal doubts and fears. (Trotter 1921: 109-110)

A whole jumble of associations. The closest analogy would be the suggestion that positive emotions are related to belonging and negative emotions with isolation.

All these characters can be traced in an animal such as the dog. The mere statement of them, necessarily in mental terms, involves the liability to a certain inexactitude if it is not recognized that no hypothesis as to the consciousness of the dog is assumed but that the description in mental terms is given because of its convenient brevity. An objective description of the actual conduct on which such summarized statements are founded would be impossibly voluminous. (Trotter 1921: 110)

Orgiastic. Orgita ohkas täis targutuse peale. This is the most general statement of the problems I'm dealing with. Malinowski's use of early social psychology terminology (sympathy and sentiments) glosses over large issues, such as "primitive mentality" and the communication of ideas, that a clear elucidation of all of them will necessarily have to be voluminous. The best hypothesis I currently have is that he merely concretized aspects of conversation and communication that were floating around everywhere at the time. I hope to show, in due course, that "phatic communion" was merely his contribution to a discussion diffusely held throughout the field of social psychology at the time, and in many ways still going on today.

Protective gregariousness confers on the flock or herd advantages perhaps less obvious but certainly not less important. A very valuable gain is the increased efficiency of vigilance which is possible. Such efficiency depends on the available number of actual watchers and the equisite sensitiveness of the herd and all its members to the signals of such sentries. No one can have watched a herd of sheep for long without being impressed with the delicacy with which a supposed danger is detected, transmitted throughout the herd, and met by an appropriate movement. (Trotter 1921: 110)

Sentries - censors - translation blocks - bifurcation points. Detection, transmission, and reaction also describe the actions of a new text in the semiosphere.

Another advantage enjoyed by the new unit is a practical solution of the difficulties incident upon the emotion of fear. Fear is essentially an enfeebling passion, yet in the sheep and such animals it is necessarily developed to a high degree in the interests of safety. The danger of this specialization is neutralized by the implication of so large a part of the individual's personality in the herd and outside of himself. Alarm becomes a passion, as it were, of the herd rather than of the individual, and the appropriate response by the individual is to an impulse received from the herd and not directly from the actual object of alarm. It seems to be in this way that the paralysing emotion of fear is held back from the individual, while its effects can reach him only as the active and formidable passion of panic. The gregarious herbivora are in fact timid but not fearful animals. All the various mechanisms in which the social habit shows itself apparently have as their general function a maximal sensitiveness to danger of the herd as a whole, combined with maintaining with as little interruption as possible an atmosphere of calm within the herd, so that the individual members can occupy themselves in the serious business of grazing. (Trotter 1921: 111)

The social semiotics of fear and maintaining "a pleasant atmosphere of polite, social intercourse" (PC 9.4).

When we come to consider man we find ourselves faced at once by some of the most interesting problems in the biology of the social habit. It is probably not necessary now to labour the proof of the fact that man is a gregarious animal in literal fact, that he is as essentially gregarious as the bee and the ant, the sheep, the ox, and the horse. The issue of characteristically gregarious reactions which his conduct presents furnishes incontestable proof of this thesis, which is thus an indispensable clue to an inquiry into the intricate problems of human society. (Trotter 1921: 112)

I am cocksured that some great thinkers have laboured such proofs profusely, and knowledge of such contentions would greatly advance our knowledge of those intricate problems of human society. Trotter's book, thus far, has proved itself as a highlight between Malinowski's phaticity and earlier discussions about such matters.

1. He is intolerant and fearful of solitude, physical or mental. This intolerance is the cause of the mental fixity and intellectual incuriousness, which, to a remarkable degree for an animal with so capacious a brain, he constantly displays. As is well known, the resistance to a new idea is always primarily a matter of prejudice, the development of intellectual objections, just or otherwise; being a secondary process in spite of the common delusion to the contrary. This intimate dependence on the herd is traceable not merely in matters physical and intellectual, but also betrays itself in the deeper recesses of personality as a sense of incompleteness which compels the individual to reach out towards some larger existence than his own, some encompassing being in whom his perplexities may find a solution and his longing peace. Physical loneliness and intellectual isolation are effectually solaced by the nearness and agreement of the herd. The deeper personal necessities cannot be met - at any rate, in such society as has so far been evolved - by so superficial a union; the capacity for intercommunication is still too feebly developed to bring the individual into complete and soul-satisfying harmony with his fellows, to convey from one to another

Thoughts hardly to be packed
Into a narrow act,
Fancies that broke through language and escaped.

Religious feeling is therefore a character inherent in the very structure of the human mind, and is the expression of a need which must be recognized by the biologist as neither superficial nor transitory. (Trotter 1921: 113)

This is the first "more obvious gregarious character" (ibid) displayed by man. (1) "There is in all human beings the well-known tendency to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other's company" (PC 3.2) and the crowd of course lowers the intellectual level of its constituents, as Freud put it; (2) in free, social intercourse, the speaker affirms the traditions of the herd and rationalizes its aversions to new ideas; (3) we enjoy each other's company and in some sense gain our life-purpose (or, as some would say, life-illusion) from the herd; (4) to be agreeable in conversation is a priority shared throughout the Western world; (5) yet free, social intercourse is aimless and not about the exchange of ideas, thus; (6) unsatisfying or disagreeable (for some); (7) therefore its collective effervescence is a religious affair, a ritual, which; (8) must be recognized as universal.

As long as such a system is compelled to ignore, to depreciate, or to deny the reality of such manifestly important phenomena as the altruistic emotions, the religious needs and feelings, the experiences of awe and wonder and beauty, the illumination of the mystic, the rapture of the prophet, the unconquerable endurance of the martyr, so long must it fail in its claims to universality. It is therefore necessary to lay down with the strongest emphasis the proposition that the religious needs and feelings of man are a direct and necessary manifestation of the inherence of instinct with which he is born, and therefore deserve consideration as respectful and observation as minute as any other biological phenomenon. (Trotter 1921: 114)

The poetry of content and the content of poetry. Some support for the hunch that a phatic examination of the process of religious proselytization (in Älskade Terrorist or Prohvet Maltsvet) would be more profitable, in terms of analytic insights, than any other possible course.

2. He is more sensitive to the voice of the herd than to any other influence. It can inhibit or stimulate his thoughts and conduct. It is the source of his moral codes, of the sanctions of his ethics and philosophy. It can endow him with energy, courage, and endurance, and can as easily take these away. [|] It can make him acquiese in his own punishment and embrace his executioner, submit to poverty, bow to tyranny, and sink without complaint under starvation. Not merely can it make him accept hardship and suffering unrestingly, but it can make him accept as truth the explanation that his perfectly preventable afflictions are sublimely just and gentle. It is in this acme of the power of herd suggestion that is perhaps the most absolutely incontestable proof of the profoundly gregarious nature of man. (Trotter 1921: 114-115)

The power of discourse. Accepting explanation = ideology. The voice of the herd can make you love the big brother.

3. He is subject to the passions of the pack in his mob violence and the passions of the herd in his panics. These activities are by no means limited to the outbursts of actual crowds, but are to be seen equally clearly in the hue and cry of newspapers and public after some notorious criminal or scapegoat, and in the success of scaremongering by the same agencies. (Trotter 1921: 115)

Emotional contagion in Freud. The quip about newspapers remains true today with fake news, clickbait and moral panics. Recently in Estonia, the Eesti 200 political party effectively memed up a bus stop advertisement that rustled a lot of jimmies ("Estonians stand here" and "Russians stand here").

4. He is remarkably susceptible to leadership. This quality in man may very naturally be thought to have a basis essentially rational rather than instinctive if its manifestations are not regarded with a special effort to attain an objective attitude. How thoroughly reasonable it appears that a body of men seeking a common object should put themselves under the guidance of some strong and expert [|] personality who can point out the path most profitably to be pursued, who can hearten his followers and bring all their various powers into a harmonious pursuit of the common object. The rational basis of the relation is, however, seen to be at any rate open to discussion when we consider the qualities in a leader upon which his authority so often rests, for there can be little doubt that their appeal is more generally to instinct than to reason. In ordinary politics it must be admitted that the gift of public speaking is of more decisive value than anything else. If a man is fluent, dextrous, and ready on the platform, he possesses the one indispensable requisite for statemanship; if in addition he has the gift of moving deeply the emotions of his hearers, his capacity for guiding the infinite complexities of national life becomes undeniable. Experience has shown that no exceptional degree of any other capacity is necessary to make a successful leader. There need be no specially arduous training, no great weight of knowledge either of affairs or the human heart, no receptiveness to new ideas, no outlook into reality. Indeed, the mere absence of such seems to be an advantage; for originality is apt to appear to the people as flightiness, scepticism as feebleness, caution as doubt of the great political principles that may happen at the moment to be immutable. (Trotter 1921: 115-116)

Now reading: Guidebooks führ Hitler. Chapter: "A perfect explanation of Trumpism". It is a cosmic coincidence that the furth characteristic of human gregariousness is in correspondence with the so-called fourth function I've been tracing in Malinowski: the man on the soap-box is not addressing your neocortex, he's invoking the reptilian parts that dupe you into believing you have voluntarily decided to become a follower. Recall also the etymological hypothesis of fame, which includes renown. The man on the soap-box, in short, is "shining".

We like to see photographs of him nursing his little grand-daughter, we like to know that he plays golf badly, and rides the bicycle like our common selves, we enjoy hearing of "pretty incidents" in which he has given the blind crossing-sweeper a penny or begged a glass of water at a wayside cottage - and there are excellent biological reasons for our gratification. (Trotter 1921: 117)

Or, we count how many times he goes golfing during his time in public office and how many millions of dollars it costs to the taxpayer.

5. His relations with his fellows are dependent upon the recognition of him as a member of the herd. It is important to the success of a gregarious species that individuals should be able to move freely within the large unit while strangers are excluded. Mechanisms to secure such personal recognition are therefore a characteristic feature of the social habit. The primitive olfactory greeting common to so many of the lower animals was doubtless rendered impossible for man by his comparative loss of the sense of smell long before it ceased to accord with his pretensions, yet in a thriving active species the function of recognition was as necessary as ever. Recognition by vision could be of only limited value, and it seems probable that speech very early became the accepted medium. Possibly the necessity to distinguish friend from foe was one of the conditions which favoured the development of articulate speech. Be this as it may, speech at the present time retains strong evidence of the survival in it of the function of herd recognition. As is usual with instinctive activities in man, the actual state of affairs is concealed by a deposit of rationalized explanation which is apt to discourage merely superficial inquiry. The function of conversation is, it is to be supposed, ordinarily regarded [|] as being the exchange of ideas and information. Doubtless it has come to have such a function, but an objective examination of ordinary conversation shows that the actual conveyance of ideas takes a very small part in it. As a rule the exchange seems to consist of ideas which are necessarily common to the two speakers, and are known to be so by each. The process, however, is none the less satisfactory for this; indeed, it seems even to derive its satisfactoriness therefrom. The interchange of the conventional lead and return is obviously very far from being tedious or meaningless to the interlocutors. They can, however, have derived nothing from it but the confirmation to one another of their sympathy and of the class or classes to which they belong. (Trotter 1921: 118-119)

Holy Moly! I hit the mother lode. This is the birth of phatic communion. The mechanization of speech with Gardiner. The negation of communicating ideas. The tedious observations known to everyone. The mere exchange of conventional words (stereotyped utterances). The heterogeneous sympathy. The meaninglessness. The most important qualities of phatic communion are all here.

Conversations of greeting are naturally particularly rich in the exchange of purely ceremonial remarks, ostensibly based on some subject like the weather, in which there must necessarily be an absolute community of knowledge. It is possible, however, for a long conversation to be made up entirely of similar elements, and to contain no trace of any conveyance of new ideas; such intercourse is probably that which on the whole is most satisfactory to the "normal" man and leaves him more comfortably stimulated than would originality or brilliance, or any other manifestation of the strange and therefore of the disreputable. (Trotter 1921: 119)

Salutations et conversation. This passage is so significant that I've already screencapped it and made it the heading of this post. While C. Z. did recommend keeping my sources close to my chest, I have decided to go the opposite route and put it all out there as much as possible. It seems likely that if I don't carry my analysis far enough, someone else some time later might. Altruism is more calling than the alternative. Also, my fantasy of a diffuse community of researchers simultaneously grappling with the problem of phatic communion and attempting to give it a resolute evaluation by 1923 when it turns a hundred is just that, a fantasy. It seems more likely that I'm the only idiot who finds intellectual satisfaction in puzzling out something so insignificant.

Phatic communion is a conversation of greeting! Community of knowledge is often treated as common code or common knowledge. Jakobson is vindicated with a lorg conversation, and the core issue of prolongation. For it's not simply a neutralizing factor, it shifts the emphasis to the problem of continuation for the sake of continuation, and the communication issues this highlights. Trotter here gives us a better vocabulary to discuss such matters: his satisfactory is Mahaffy's agreeable. Phatic communion in the ideal form is a conversation of greeting that does not exceed that phase in any remarkable way.

Conversation between persons unknown to one another is also - when satisfactory - apt to be rich in the ritual of recognition. When one hears or takes part in these elaborate evolutions, gingerly proffering one after another of one's marks of identity, one's views on the weather, on fresh air and draughts, on the Government and on uric acid, watching intently for the first low hint of a growl, which will show one belongs to the wrong pack [|] and must withdraw, it is impossible not to be reminded of the similar manœvres of the dog, and to be thankful that Nature has provided us with a less direct, though perhaps a more tedious, code. (Trotter 1921: 119-120)

Identifying the in- and out-groups. Malinowski leaves out marks of identity and political aspects, which would be typical of him, having to negate between British colonial powers and regional administrations, local private business persons and missionaries, and the various tribes of various islands. It would have gotten ugly fast if Malinowski were to analyze identity and politics; he even had very little to say, and if then pejorative, about the public interests of gossip. The latter are remarked upon here and there but apparently never brought together for examination. I have to add that the crowl of the pack makes it quite ugly, reminds me of that compendium on the nonverbal communication of aggression in wolves and primates. Hot damn. At least one thing makes more clear sense now - Mead repeats the dog maneuvers over and over because it's a powerful visual and conveys something more primal than primates. That Trotter finally ties it up with codes is just a beautiful cherry on the cake.

It may appear that we have been dealing here with a far-reaching and laboured analogy, and making much of a comparison of trivialities merely for the sake of compromising, if that could be done, human pretension to reason. To show that the marvel of human communion began, perhaps, as a very humble function, and yet retains traces of its origin, is in no way to minimize the value or dignity of the more fully developed power. The capacity for free intercommunication between individual of the species has meant so much in the evolution of man, and will certainly come in the future to mean so incalculably more, that it cannot be regarded as anything less than a master element in the shaping of his destiny. (Trotter 1921: 120)

My eyes may have never gazed upon a more beautiful sight. The "pejorative" aspect signifies the typical attitude towards a subject domain: Malinowski is talking about the "savage" and "primitive" peoples, La Barre about primates, babies, lovers, people who live together, schizophrenics, etc. and Jakobson about incompetent youngsters, babies, parrots, Naturvolker and aphasics. There is always some incompetence, primarily some pretension to Reason with a capital letter, of categories of language users who do not meet some invisible criteria of competent, satisfactory, agreeable communication. The ending gets heavy; only dog can know the future.

It is apparent after very little consideration that the extent of man's individual mental development is a factor which has produced many novel characters in his manifestations of the social habit, and has even concealed to a great extent the profound influence this instinct has in regulating his conduct, his thoughts, and his society. (Trotter 1921: 120)

The extent of man's pretension to reason is revealed in the influence of his social instinct upon his thought and conduct. A suitable third, actually First, would be "senses", which would require an examination of the influence of "instincts" on sense and perception, possibly found even in social perceptions. Man is so rational that he has rationalized away his instinctive baseline.

Large mental capacity in the individual, as we have already seen, has the effect of providing a wide freedom of response to instinctive impulses, so that, while the individual is no less impelled by instinct than a more primitive type, the manifestations of these impulses in his conduct are very varied, and his conduct loses the appearance of a [|] narrow concentration on its instinctive object. It needs only to pursue this reasoning to a further stage to reach the conclusion that mental capacity, while in no way limiting the impulsive power of instinct, may, by providing an infinite number of channels into which the impulse is free to flow, actually prevent the impulse from attaining the goal of its normal object. In the ascetic the sex instinct is defeated, in the martyr that of self-preservation, not because these instincts have been abolished, but because the activity of the mind has found new channels for them to flow in. As might be expected, the much more labile herd instinct has been still more subject to this deflection and dissipation without its potential impulsive strengthe being in any way impaired. It is this process which has enabled primitive psychology so largely to ignore the fact that man still is, as much as ever, endowed with a heritage of instinct and incessantly subject to its influence. (Trotter 1921: 120-121)

Self-control. The neocortex. Delayed desires. Self-conditioning. Above: "think of the anorexic's aversion to food, the celibate's aversion to sex, and the recent case of a man on death row hanging himself because his due date was constantly delayed".

Man's mental capacity, again, has enabled him as a species to flourish enormously, and thereby to increase to a prodigious extent the size of the unit in which the individual is merged. The nation, if the term be used to describe every organization under a completely independent, supreme government, must be regarded as the smallest unit on which natural selection now unrestrictedly acts. Between such units there is free competition, and the ultimate regulators of these relations is physical force. This statement needs the qualification that the delimitation between two given units may be much sharper than that between two others, so that in the first case the resort to farce is likely to occur readily, while in the second case it will be brought about only by the very ultimate necessity. The tendency to the enlargement of the social unit has been going on with certain temporary relapses throughout human history. [|] Though repeatedly checked by the instability of the larger units, it has always resumed its activity, so that it should probably be regarded as a fundamental biological drift the existence of which is a factor which must always be taken into account in dealing with the structure of human society. (Trotter 1921: 121-122)

Disregarding the natural selection, this passage appears to claim that it "a fundamental biological drift" for humans to assimilate into greater and greater units. We may be the species of the planet who can either destroy or take care of all other creatures on the same chunk of space rock, or, if there were someone out there to do so with, make contact and contracts with extraterrestial intelligence.

The gregarious mind shows certain characteristics which throw some light on this phenomenon of the progressively enlarging unit. The gregarious animal is different from the solitary in the capacity to become conscious in a special way of the existence of other creatures. This specific consciousness of his fellows carries with it a characteristic element of communion with them. The individual knows another individual of the same herd as a partaker in an entity of which he himself is a part, so that the second individual is in some way and to a certain extent identical with himself and part of his own personality. He is able to feel with the other and share his pleasures and sufferings as if they were an attenuated form of his own personal experiences. The degree to which this assimilation of the interests of another person is carried depends, in a general way, on the extent of the intercommunication between the two. In human society a man's interest in his fellows is distributed about him concentrically according to a compound of various relations they bear to him which we may call in a broad way their nearness. The centrifugal fading of interest is seen when we compare the man's feeling towards one near to him with his feeling towards one farther off. He will be disposed, other things being equal, to sympathize with a relative as against a fellow-townsman, with a fellow-townsman as against a mere inhabitant of the same county, with the latter as against the rest of the country, with an Englishman as against a European, with a European as against an Asiatic, and so on until a limit is reached beyond [|] which all human interest is lost. The distribution of interest is of course never purely geographical, but is modified by, for example, trade and professional sympathy, and by special cases of intercommunication which bring topographically distant individuals into a closer grade of feeling than their mere situation would demand. The essential principle, however, is that the degree of sympathy with a given individual varies directly with the amount of intercommunication with him. The capacity to assimilate the interests of another individual with one's own, to allow him, as it were, to partake in one's own personality, is what is called altruism, and might equally well perhaps be called expansive egoism. It is a characteristic of the gregarious animal, and is a perfectly normal and necessary development in him of his instinctive inheritance. (Trotter 1921: 122-123)

The life of consciousness of others (Clay). The meaning of communion. Mutual recognition and identification appear to be most important aspects. Sympathy in the sense of Gemütsbewegung, of the harmonizing or pullulating movements of the soul. In Morris's sharp and succinct terminology, this is communization. That's perhaps the most interesting metatheoretical aspect of Trotter's contribution - it simultaneously ties together the American off-shoot of "common experience" with Jakobson's purported prolonging. The thing that fails in phatic communication is most likely exactly this herd-recognition, this recognition and identification with each others interests, which can only borne out of constant association, of ties of union. The concentric nearness ordeal presented here could very well be slided into Ruesch's matrix, but so can many things. In any case achieving "a closer grade of feeling" might be that social sentiment which binds the hearer to the speaker. But it could also shed light on those social sentiments which make sociability a necessity (ambition, vanity, will to power, greed, etc.). For the degree of sympathy being dependent upon the amount of intercommunication I have numerous later paraphrases, such as my own frequent and loose dictum that human relationships are constituted by constant association - which I've blended from Laver, La Barre, and Blumer. Lastly, a reiteration and confirmation: The appearance of altruism is another topic subsumed under the more obvious issues involved in phatic communion. I believe the philosophers are still banging on about altruism everywhichway they can. There's probably a wealth of discussion in this key about the more economic aspects of Malinowski's fieldwork (isn't Kula a circulation characterised by expansive egoism?). But it might be some time before I train my sights on Edvard Westermarck.

"Teine Maroko vang on kuulus soome teadusemees, professor Edward Westermarck. Ka tema saabus Maroko rannikule esimest korda kolmkümmend aastat tagasi, kui praegused eeskujulikud teed olid vaid hobueeslite radu, ja ainuke võimalik reisimisviis oli palgata terve kaamelikaravan juhtidega ja kaitsesalgaga ning taluda ühes oma telgid. Fezis Westermarck sai loa püstitada oma kaks telki kesk medina turgu! Ja Marrakech'is ei olnud tol ajal veel teisi eurooplasi, pääle kahe misjonäri, kes, nagu Westermarck tähendas, ei suutnud küll kedagi ristiusku pöörata, aga sellevastu tõmbasid hambaid ja tohterdasid moslemisid menuga ja olid hästi sallitud rahva seas." (Kallas, Aino 1930. Tangeri vangis. Olion 6: 14-16; lk 14-15.)

In recent times, freedom of travel, and the development of the resources rendered available by education, have increased the general mass of intercommunication to an enormous extent. Side by side with this, altruism has come more and more into recognition as a supreme moral law. There is [|] already a strong tendency to accept selfishness as a test of sin, and consideration for others as a test of virtue, and this has influenced even those who by public profession are compelled to maintain that right and wrong are to be defined only in terms of an arbitrary extra-natural code. (Trotter 1921: 123-124)

Reminiscent of how both Ruesch & Bateson (1951) and La Barre (1954) begin their respective books, by admonishing the technological advances in transportation and communication. What I'd add to this now would be a short history of how communication was derived from transportation - the channel referred to water communications, and telegraph wires indeed followed rail communication. This knowledge becomes unavoidable when looking up how the word "communication" was used at the very beginning of the 20th century. From what I've gathered it appears to give way to communication in our modern sense of sharing information after WWI, with Franz Boas perhaps standing as a pivotal turning point. As to sin and virtue, see the duty of agreeable conversation and the vices of disagreeable conversation.

As intercommunication tends constantly to widen the field of action of altruism, a point is reached when the individual becomes capable of some kind of sympathy, however attenuated, with being outside the limits of the biological unit within which the primitive function of altruism lies. This extension is perhaps possible only in man. In a creature like the bee the rigidly limited mental capacity of the individual and the closely organized society of the hive combine to make the boundary of the hive correspond closely with the uttermost limit of the field over which altruism is active. The bee, capable of great sympathy and understanding in regard to her fellow-members of the hive, is utterly callous and without understanding in regard to any creature of external origin and existence. Man, however, with his infinitely greater capacity for assimilating [|] experience, has not been able to maintain the rigid limitation of sympathy to the unit, the boundaries of which tend to acquire a certain indefiniteness not seen in any of the lower gregarious types. (Trotter 1921: 124)

Humans are uniquely brainy, got it. What is truly meritorious here is the assimilation of experience, which sounds like a window into the Umwelten of other species. Though, to be fair, even the armchair phogeys of Mind wrote tediously lengthy argumentations about human capacity for sympathy with the life and consciousness of other species, the most common examples involving dogs, but also Peirce with "The microscopist looks to see whether the motions of a little creature show any purpose. If so, there is mind there" (PC 1.269).

Hence tends to appear a sense of international justice, a vague feeling of being responsibly concerned in all human affairs and by a natural consequence the ideas and impulses denoted under the term "pacifism." (Trotter 1921: 125)

Something to connect with James Slotta's (2015) examination of the voice of the community (compare to the gregarious attribute of being responsive to the voice of the herd, here, above).

One of the most natural and obvious consequences of war is a hardening of the boundaries of the social unit and a retraction of the vague feelings towards international sympathy which are a characteristic product of peace and intercommunication. Thus it comes about that pacifism and internationalism are in great disgrace at the present time; they are regarded as the vapourings of cranky windbags who have inevitably been punctured at the first touch of the sword; they are, our political philosophers tell us, but products of the miasm of sentimental fallacy which tends to be bred in the relaxing atmosphere of peace. Perhaps no general expressions have been more common since the beginning of the war, in the mouths of those who have undertaken our instruction in the meaning of events, than the propositions that pacifism is now finally exploded and shown always to have been nonsense, that war is and always will be an inevitable necessity in human affairs as man is what is called a fighting animal, and that not only is the abolition of war an impossibility, but should the abolition of it unhappily prove to be possible after all and be accomplished, the result could only be degeneration and disaster. (Trotter 1921: 125)

It is difficult to express how disheartening it is to read such pronouncements during a time when it looks like global international relations are hardening and the world appears to be veering towards replaying the previous century. On the theoretical side, pugnacity is indeed another underlying theme which should be examined more closely, along perhaps with the significant distinction between lead and leaderless groups, collectives, masses, etc. Humans, though, "commune" during both peace and war.

It is impossible to leave this subject without some comment on the famous doctrine that war is a biological necessity. Even if one knew nothing of those who have enunciated this proposition, its character would enable one to suspect it of being the utterance of a soldier rather than a biologist. There is about it a confidence that the vital effects of war are simple and easy to define and a cheerful contempt for the considerable biological difficulties of the subject that remind one of the bracing military atmosphere, in which a word of command is the supreme fact, rather than that of the laboratory, [|] where facts are the masters of all. It may be supposed that even in the country of its birth the doctrine seemed more transcendently true in times of peace amid a proud and brilliant regime than it does now after more than twelve months of war. (Trotter 1921: 126-127)

Thanks for not specifying who enunciates such propositions or what country gave it birth. Otherwise we could examine authoritarianism, command economy, and the post-communist mafia state.

War and war only had produced the best and greatest and strongest State - indeed, the only State worthy of the name; therefore war is the great creative and sustaining force of State, or the universe is a mere meaningless jumble of cacidents. (Trotter 1921: 127)

"You know, Rothman... When I came back from this war, I came back to nothing. Really nothing. No homeland, no home, no parents, no family, no fiance, no profession, no job, no food, no closet full of old hockey sticks and tennis rackets. Not even an address. All I have in this world is the conviction that I am a great artist and a master builder."

Man is unique among gregarious animals in the size of the major unit upon which natural selection and its supposedly chief instrument, war, is open to act unchecked. There is no other animal in which the size of the unit, however laxly held together, has reached anything even remotely approaching the inclusion of one-fifth or one-quarter of the whole species. It is plain that a mortal contest between two units of such a monstrous size introduces an altogether new mechanism into the hypothetical "struggle for existence" on which the conception of the biological necessity of war is founded. (Trotter 1921: 128)

Here I must agree with Yuval Noah Harari in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018) on the global population of humanity facing a struggle for existence in which isolationism offers no benefits and only international cooperation between all nations capable of contributing must do so in in order to avoid drowning, scorching, thirst and hunger, and general destruction by unstoppable natural forces. Is man-made climate change a means of natural selection?

It may be objected, however, that anything approaching extermination could obviously not be possible in a war between such immense units as those of modern man. (Trotter 1921: 129)

Hey, throw me that nuclear football!

Nevertheless, the object of each of the two adversaries would be to impose its will on the other, and to destroy in it all that was especially individual, all the types of activity and capacity which were the most characteristic in its civilization and therefore the couse of hostility. The effect of success in such an endeavour would be an enormous impoverishment of the variety of the race and a corresponding effect on progress. (Trotter 1921: 129)

In other words, destroy all cultural diversity in order to homogenize everyone and establish a world government which could not engage in war because it would be waging war against itself. This only calls to mind how Russia did go to war against itself in Chechenya, and how the U.S. has a history of military engagements taken up in complete disregard of the will of the people (Vietnam, Iraq). On the same page, though, Trotter insists that such forceful spread of uniformity is practically impossible because every civilization regards itself as the penultimate amongst all civilizations (one is unable to estimate the value of one's own civilization), and doing so would impede progress. I may be misreading things because the discussion is rather unpleasant.

Man's complete conquest of the grosser enemies of his race has allowed him leisure for turning his restless pugnacity - a quality no longer fully occupied upon his non-human environment - against his own species. (Trotter 1921: 130)

How grim! When humans get bored they make war.

It can scarcely be questioned that the organization of a people for war tends to encourage unduly a type of individual who is abnormally insensitive to doubt, to curiosity, and to the development of original thought. (Trotter 1921: 130)

In a later portion of the book (pp. 167-168) he describes three types of social habits to produce national unity. The purely aggressive or protective form, he writes, views fighting as man's supreme activity, and travelled and explored "less out of curiosity than in search of prey". This is illustrated by the northern barbarians who profited from the disintegration of the Roman Empire. This attitude would also describe the post-communist mafia state.

It is the business of an Empire not to encounter overwhelming enemies. Declaring itself to be the most perfect example of its kind and the foreordained heir of the world will remain no more than a pleasant - and dangerous - indulgence, and will not prevent it showing by its fate that the fruits of perfection and the promise of permanence are not demonstrated in the wholesale [|] manufacture of enemies and in the combination of them into an alliance of unparalleled strength. (Trotter 1921: 131-132)

Hence, the U.S. has been reduced to bombing the deserts and mountains, and Russia picks on its neighbours.

It may well, therefore, be removed to the lumber-room of speculation and stored among the other pseudo-scientific dogmas of political "biologists" - the facile doctrines of degeneracy, the pragmatic lecturings on national characteristics, on Teutons and Celts, and Latins and Slavs, on pure races and mixed races, and all the other ethnological conceits with which the ignorant have gulled the innocent so long. (Trotter 1921: 132)

Well, now I know how to call the whole "national characteristics" ordeal. Good to know that Trotter regarded it as the dribble it was.

The study of man as a gregarious animal has not been pursued with the thoroughness and objectivity it deserves and must receive if it is to yield its full value in illuminating his status and in the management of society. The explanation of this comparative neglect is to be found in the complex irregularity which obscures the social habit as manifested by man. Thus it comes to be believed that gregariousness is no longer a fully functional and indispensable inheritance, but survives at the present day merely in a vestigial form as an interesting but quite unimportant relic of primitive activites. We have already shown that man is ruled by instinctive impulses just as imperative and just as [|] characteristically social as those of any other gregarious animal. A further argument that he is to-day as actively and essentially a social animal as ever is furnished by the fact that he suffers from the disadvantages of such an animal to a more marked degree perhaps than any other. In physical matters he owes to his gregariousness and its uncontrolled tendency to the formation of crowded communities with enclosed dwellings, the seriousness of many of his worst diseases, such as tuberculosis, typhus, and plague; there is no evidence that these diseases effect anything but an absolutely indiscriminate destruction, killing the strong and the weakly, the socially useful and the socially useless, with equal readiness, so that they cannot be regarded as even of the least selective value to man. The only other animal which is well known to suffer seriously from disease as a direct consequence of its social habit is the honey bee - as has been demonstrated by recent epidemics of exterminating severity. (Trotter 1921: 132-133)

Here the discussion gets really interesting. Are the above-enumerated characteristics of gregariousness outdated relics of the human context of evolution? I.e. 21st century software running on 50 000 year old hardware. This passage certainly adds something to Malinowski's attitude towards primitive people as dark-skinned Phemes and his admonition that he could have just as well performed such an analysis on examples drawn from Western civilization, particularly European drawing rooms, i.e. living room conversations and cocktail parties (Cf. Goffman 1953). In the latter portion about the disadvantages of modern civilization, particularly the disease, calls to mind how schizoprenia was thought of as a Western disease, and Malcolm Gladwell in What the Dog Saw (2009) on breast cancer and baby pills, how anthropologists have found that among remaining primitive peoples there is a later onset, and systemic infrequency of mestruation due to poor nutrition, frequent pregnancies and breast feeding. In other words, it might not be natural nor healthy for women not to have children. The general ethos towards society is also reminiscent of John Cowper Powys's philosophy of solitude and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit, both of which decried the very technological advances in transportation and communication others above praise.

It is a commonplace of human affairs that combined action is almost invariably less intelligent than individual action, a fact which shows how very little the members of the species are yet capable of combination and co-ordination and how far inferior - on account, no doubt, of his greater mental capacity - man is in this respect to the bee. (Trotter 1921: 135)

I shall have to collect such pronouncements and ultimately compare them to other opinions and modern propositions on the same subject.

There is abundant specialization of a sort; but it is inexact, lax, wasteful of energy, and often quite useless through being on the one hand superfluous or on the other incomplete. We have large numbers of experts in the various branches of science [|] and the arts, but we insist upon their adding to the practice of their specialisms the difficult task of earning their living in an open competitive market. The result is that we tend to get at the summit on our professions only those rare geniuses who combine real specialist capacity with the arts of the bagman. An enormous proportion of our experts have to earn their living by teaching - an exhausting and exacting art for which they are not at all necessarily qualified, and one which demands a great amount of time for the earning of a very exiguous pittance. (Trotter 1921: 135-136)

That is indeed the case. Think of student study loans. An enlightened open society of the future should do best to increase the ranks of its specialists and insist upon the significance of producing knowledge for the sake of producing knowledge as the universal role of human species in this dumb (archaic: silent, incommunicative) and inhospitable universe.

The teaching of our best schools, a task so important that it should be entrusted to none but those highly qualified by nature and instruction in the art, is almost entirely in the hands of athletes and grammarians of dead languages. (Trotter 1921: 136)

Saucy. A contrast to those bemoaning the eradication of classical liberal humanitarian education (e.g. Margaret Mead and J. P. Postgate).

The moral homogeneity so plainly visible in the [|] society of the bee is replaced in man by a segregation into classes which tends always to obscure the unity of the nation and often is directly antagonistic to it. The readiness with which such segregation occurs seems to be due to the invincible strength of the gregarious impulse in the individual man and to the immense size and strength of the modern major unit of the species. [...] Segregation in itself is always dangerous in that it provides the individual with a substitute for the true major unit - the nation - and in times when there is an urgent need for national homogeneity may rpove to be a hostile force. (Trotter 1921: 136-137)

Is the nation the true major unit? Why not humanity? Curiously, this is the exact political discussion some people are having right now, e.g. Ruuben Kaalep: inimsuse dogma (Postimees online opinion piece, accessed Jan. 19, 2019).

The maintenance of the social system - that is, of the segregation of power and prestige, of ease and leisure, and the corresponding segregations of labour, privation, and poverty - depends upon an enormously elaborate system of rationalization, tradition, and morals, and upon almost innumerable indirect mechanisms ranging from the drugging of society with alcohol to the distortion of religious principle in the interests of the established order. (Trotter 1921: 138)

Perhaps the most profound and productive full sentence in any book I've ever read. I had to mark nearly the whole of it as important, barring the drugging of society with alcohol - many believe U.S. government agencies routed addictive narcotics to certain communities for the same purpose, and there are probably innumerable easily demonstrable examples of such means all over the world. What is relevant for my research is the light this sentence throws on the "social system" and its segregation of exactly these listed items. When they say socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, this is what I think they mean. The rich and powerful live in an age of leisure and luxury while the powerless working poor suffer all sorts of privations upon their time, energy, comfort, and rights. What are modern prisons in the U.S. and Russia if not slave labour camps?

Such a new principle is the conscious direction of society by man, the refusal by him to submit indefinitely to the dissipation of his energies and the disappointment of his ideals in inco-ordination and confusion. Thus would appear a function for that individual mental capacity of man which has so far, when limited to local and personal ends, tended but to increase the social confusion. (Trotter 1921: 139)

Made me think of the failure of mental communion in Durkheim. That's the basic critique Malinowski makes of Durkheim's examination of the religious life of Australian aborigines in anthropological literature is that they do not congregate to establish common sentiments, that is, to harmonize their feelings about certain ideas, but that on such occasions as a public speaker addressing a mass of listeners does not really establish a communication of ideas with others but instead just creates a situation for people to spend time together and exchange social niceties with no promise of an orderly co-oordination of collective action.

Expression, of course, has been found for the usual view that primitive instincts normally vestigial or dormant are aroused into activity by the stress of war, and that there is a process of rejuvenation of "lower" instincts at the expense of "higher." All such views, apart [|] from their theoretical unsoundness, are uninteresting because they are of no practical value. (Trotter 1921: 139-140)

The usual view is represented, no doubt, by Herbert Spencer. Note the collective nature of the iprimitive instincts. Whole groups of people are being aroused into activity. Would a study of phatic communion have practical value? It doesn't seem so. But it would definitely introduce some soundness into our understanding of theoretically unsound views. The self-contradictions of past views can help the consistency of emerging views.

The war that began in August 1914 was of a kind peculiarly suitable to produce the most marked and typical psychological effects. It has long been foreseen as no more than a mere possibility of immense disaster - of disaster so outrageous that by that ver yfact it had come to be regarded with a passionate incredulity. It had loomed before the people, at any rate of England, as an event almost equivalent to the ultimate overthrow of all things. It had been led up to be years of doubt and anxiety, sometimes rising to apprehension, sometimes lapsing into unbelief, and culminating in an agonized period of suspense, while the avalance tottered and muttered on its base before the final and still incredible catastrophe. Such were the circumstances which no doubt led to the actual outbreak producing a remarkable series of typical psychological reactions. The first feeling of the ordinary citizen was fear - an immense, vague, aching anxiety, perhaps typically vague and unfocused, but naturally tending soon to localize itself in channels customary to the individual and leading to fears for his future, his food supply, his family, his trade, and so forth. Side by side with fear there was a heightening of the normal intolerance of isolation. Loneliness became an urgently unpleasant feeling, and the individual experienced an intense and active desire for the company and even physical contact of his fellows. In such company he was aware of a great accession of confidence, courage, and moral power. It was possible for an observant person to trace the actual [|] influence of his circumstances upon his judgment, and to notice that isolation tended to depress his confidence while company fortified it. The necessity for companionship was strong enough to break down the distinctions of class, and dissipate the reserve between strangers which is to some extent a concomitant mechanism. The change in the customary frigid atmosphere of the railway train, the omnibus, and all such meeting-places was a most interesting experience to the psychologist, and he could scarcely fail to be struck by its obvious biological meaning. Perhaps the most striking of all these early phenomena was the strength and vitality of rumour, probably because it afforded by far the most startling evidence that some other and stronger force than reason was at work in the formation of opinion. It was, of course, in no sense an unusual fact that non-rational opinion should be so widespread; the new feature was that such opinion should be able to spread so rapidly and become established so firmly altogether regardless of the limits within which a given opinion tends to remain localized in times of peace. Non-rational opinion under normal conditions is as a rule limited in its extent by a very strict kind of segregation; the succesful rumours of the early periods of the war invaded all classes and showed a capacity to overcome prejudice, education, or scepticism. The observer, clearly conscious as he might be of the mechanisms at work, found himself irresistibly drawn to the acceptance of the more popular beliefs; and even the most convinced believer in the normal prevalence of non-rational belief could scarcely have exaggerated the actual state of affairs. Closely allied with this accessibility to rumour was the readiness with which suspicions of treachery and active hostility grew and flourished about any one of even foreign appearance or origin. It is not intended to [|] attempt to discuss the origin and meaning of the various types of fable which have been epidemic in opinion; the fact we are concerned with here is their immense vitality and power of growth. (Trotter 1921: 140-142)

Absolutely amazing. Finally "the strange and unpleasant tension" (PC 4.6) finds an explanation. So does coming "together, to enjoy each other's company" (PC 3.2) and "the fundamental tendency which makes the mere presence of others a necessity for man" (PC 3.3). The psychological effects of company bears some likeness to "all the types of social sentiments such as ambition, vanity, passion for power and wealth" (PC 3.3). The reserve between strangers concerns taciturnity, and it may be realized that the "atmosphere of sociability" (PC 7.5) and "a pleasant atmosphere of polite, social intercourse" (PC 9.4) are opposed to the customary frigid atmosphere of everyday life. These are the collective psychological effects of an emergency situation. And finally, Pheme gains strenght and vitality. Non-rational opinion (gossip) becomes widespread, attractive, and accessible. People become disinterested in the sources of various sentiments, preferring instead to reaffirm folk knowledge and become incurious towards new ideas.

The characteristic feature of a really dangerous national struggle for existence is the intensity of the stimulus it applies to the social instinct. It is not that it arouses "dormant" or decayed instincts, but simply that it applies maximal stimulation to instinctive mechanisms which are more or less constantly in action in normal times. In most of his reactions as a gregarious animal in times of peace, man is acting as a member of one or another class upon which the stimulus acts. War acts upon him as a member of the greater herd, the nation, or, in other words, the true major unit. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the cardinal mental characteristics of the gregarious animal is his sensitiveness to his fellow-members of the herd. Without them his personality is, so to say, incomplete; only in relation to them can he attain satisfaction and personal stability. Corresponding with his dependence on them is his openness towards them, his specific accessibility to stimuli coming from the herd. (Trotter 1921: 142)

The emergenci situation. Reaffirming the nation the true major unit (see Ward 1894). What is especially meritorious here is the inclusion of personality and selfhood as an important component of the recognition function. Belonging.

It puts him on the alert, sets him looking for guidance, prepares him to receive commands, but almost all draws him to the herd in the first instinctive concentration against the enemy. In the presence of this stimulus even such partial and temporary isolation as was possible without it becomes intolerable. The physical presence of the herd, the actual contact and recognition of its members, becomes indispensable. This is no mere functionless desire, for re-embodiment in the herd at once fortifies courage and fills the individual with moral power, enthusiasm, and fortitude. The meaning that mere physical contact with his fellows still has for man is conclusively shown in the use that has been made of attacks in close formation in the German armies. It is perfectly clear that a densely crowded formation has psychological advantages in the face of danger, which enable quite ordinary beings to perform what are in fact prodigies of valour. Even undisciplined civil mobs have, on occasion, proved wonderfully valorous, though their absence of unity often causes their enterprise to alternate with panic. (Trotter 1921: 143)

Alertness and reciptivity surely tie in with attention and suggestion. I am amazed to see actual/mere physical contact with fellows here. And "psychological advantages"! A repetition of physical channel and psychological connection. And bound up with the "sentiments", and sense of unity, no less.

Correspondingly the activity and vitality of rumour were enormously less than they have been in the present war. The weaker stimulus is betrayed throughout the whole series of events by the weakness of all the characteristic gregarious responses. (Trotter 1921: 143; ff)

An explanation for "conviviality". In other words, Durkheim's collective effervescence is Trotter's gregarious response.

The psychological significance of the enormous activity of rumour in this war is fairly plain. That rumours spread readily and are tenacious of life is evidence of the sensitiveness to herd opinion which is so characteristic of the social instinct. The gravity of a threat to the herd is shown by nothing better than by the activity of rumour. The strong stimulus to herd instinct produces the characteristic response in the individual of a maximal sensitiveness to his fellows - to their presence or absence, their alarms and braveries, and in no less degree to their opinions. With the establishment of this state of mind the spread and survival of rumours become inevitable, and will vary directly with the seriousness of the external danger. Into the actual genesis of the individual rumours and the meaning of their tendency to take a stereotyped form we cannot enter here. (Trotter 1921: 144)

Concerning the second gregarious characteristic of man. Presence and absence become clealy defined; safety and danger; positive and negative emotions. Stereotyped form is surprising in this context but not surprising in general. Rumours are stereotyped utterances, they're a genre.

The establishment of homogeneity in the herd is the basis of morale. From homogeneity proceed moral power, enthusiasm, courage, endurance, enterprise, and all the virtues of the warrior. The peace of mind, happiness, and energy of the soldier come from his feeling himself to be a member in a body solidly united for a single purpose. The impulse towards unity that was so pronounced and universal at the beginning of the war was, then, a true and sound instinctive movement of defence. It was prepared to sacrifice all social distinctions and local prejudices if it could liberate by doing so Nature's inexhaustible stores of moral power for the defence [|] of the herd. Naturally enough it significance was misunderstood, and a great deal of its beneficient magic was wasted by the good intentions which man is so touchingly ready to accept as a substitute for knowledge. Even the functional value of unity was, and still is, for the most part ignored. We are told to weariness that the great objection to disunion is that it encourages the enemy. (Trotter 1921: 144-145)

Very curious that he takes the point of view of the warrior. It's probably part of the prehistoric vision of society shared with Spencer, that nature is red in tooth and claw, and so is natural man. The functional value of unity is sentimental?

It was towards this object that we dimly groped when we felt in the early weeks of the war the impulses of friendliness, tolerance, and goodwill towards our fellow-citizens, and the readiness to sacrifice what privileges the social system had endowed us with in order to enoy the power which a perfect homogeneity of the herd would have given us. (Trotter 1921: 146)

Maybe there is still something to Aristotle's goodwill? Perfect homogeneity, on the other hand, would have nothing to communicate.

Similar though less conspicuous manifestations are the delighted circulation of rumours, the wild scandalmongering, the eager dissemination of pessimistic inventions which are the pleasure of the smaller amongst these moral waifs. (Trotter 1921: 149)

In Malinowski's Argonauts, this circulation of rumours serves "the psychological needs of the community".

In getting work out of a living organism it is necessary to determine what is the most efficient stimulus. One can make a man's muscles contract by stimulating them with an electric battery, but one can never get so energetic a contraction with however strong a current as can be got by the natural stimulus sent out from the man's brain. Rising to a more complex level, we find that a man does not do work by order so well or so thoroughly as he does work that he desires to do voluntarily. The best way to get our work done is to get the worker to want to do it. The most urgent and potent of all stimuli, then, are those that come from within the man's soul. (Trotter 1921: 150)

Stimulating motivation. How should the Governments social psychology department stimulate the population to the point of self-sacrifice? And how to keep "their souls full of a burning passion of service" (ibid, 150).

Such a supply of mental energy can issue only from a [|] truly homogeneous herd, and it is therefore to the production of such a homogeneity of feeling that we come once more as the one unmistakable responsibility of the civilian. (Trotter 1921: 150-151)

Homogeneous sympathy!

We have seen reason to believe that there was a comparatively favourable opportunity of establishing such a national unity in the early phases of the war, and that the attainment of the same result at this late period is likely to be less easy and more costly of disturbance to the social structure. (Trotter 1921: 151)

The tropes of establishing and maintaining appear more and more like ahistorical universals.

A state of mind directed more to the nation and less immediately to the war is what is needed; the good soldier absorbed in his regiment has little indication to concern himself with the way the war is going, and the civilian should be similarly absorbed in the nation. To attain this he must feel that he belongs to the country and to his fellow-citizens, and that it and they also belong to him. The established social system sets itself steadily to deny these propositions, and not so much by its abounding material inequalities as by the moral inequalities that correspond with them. The hierarchies of rank, prestige, and consideration, at all times showing serious inconsistencies with functional value, and in war doing so more than ever, are denials of the essential propositions of perfect citizenship, not, curiously enough, through their arbitrary distribution of wealth, comfort, and leisure, but through their persistent, assured, and even unconscious assumption that there exists a graduation of moral values equally real and, to men of inferior station, equally arbitrary. (Trotter 1921: 152)

Thus, La Barre was correct to tie the process phatic communication with individual states of mind instead of the vague atmosphere of a situation. Here's the emotional statement of belonging, "the essential proposition of perfect citizenship".

Psychological considerations thus appear to indicate a very plain duty for a large class of civilians who have complained of and suffered patriotically [|] from the fact that the Government has found nothing for them to do. Let all those of superior and assured station make it a point of honour and duty to abrogate the privileges of consideration and prestige with which they are arbitrarily endowed. Let them persuade the common man that they also are, in the face of national necessity, common men. (Trotter 1921: 152-153)

An argument that should be examined in relation with the ages of leisure.

A further contribution to the establishment of a national unity of this truly Utopian degree might come from a changed attitude of mind towards his fellows in the individual. There would have to be an increased kindliness, generosity, patience, and tolerance in all his relations with others, a deliberate attempt to conquer prejudice, irritability, impatience, and self-assertiveness, a deliberate encouragement of cheerfulness, composure, and fortitude. (Trotter 1921: 153)

Nice. But the truly utopian vision would extend beyond any national unity and include and embrace all of our species, and, as there are "tediously lengthy argumentations about human capacity for sympathy with the life and consciousness of other species" (infra), possibly the whole of our living planet. The phrase "Earth's gentle custodian" pops into mind.

The official loses his grasp of the fact that the mechanism of the State is established in the interests of the citizen; the citizen comes to regard the State as a hostile institution, again which he has to defend himself, although it was made for his defence. It is a crime for him to cheat the State in the matter of taxpaying, it is no crime for the State to defraud him in excessive charges. (Trotter 1921: 155)

The militarization of U.S. police service?

The slighter kinds of aloofness, of inhuman etiquette, of legalism and senseless dignity, of indifference to the individual, of devotion to formulæ and routine are no less powerful agents in depriving the common man of the sense of intimate reality in his citizenship which might be so valuable a source of national unity. If the official machine through its utmost parts were animated by an even moderately human spirit and used as a means of binding together the people, instead of as an engine of moral disruption, it might be of incalculable value in the strengthening of morale. (Trotter 1921: 155)

The negative side-effects of mechanization. Brazil (1985) comes to mind.

Germany affords a profoundly interesting study for the biological psychologist, and it is very important that we should not allow what clearness of representation we can get into our picture of her mind to be concluded by the heated atmosphere of national feeling in which our work must be done. (Trotter 1921: 156)

Awaiting the analysis of atmospheres, which I only now realize can indeed be discerned and associated with different theoretical interests. Here, it's almost as if various atmospheres were associated with the types of social habits of gregariousness (aggressive, protective, socialized). In that case, this "heated atmosphere" would be aggressive, of course.

I have already tried to show that the acquirement of the social habit by man - though in fact there is reason to believe that the social habit preceded and made possible his distinctively human characters - has committed him to an evolutionary process which is far from being completed yet, but which [|] nevertheless must be carried out to its consummation if he is to escape increasingly severe disadvantages inherent in that biological type. In other words, the gregarious habit in an animal of large individual mental capacity is capable of becoming, and indeed must become a handicap rather than a bounty unless the society of the species undergoes a continuously progressive co-ordination which will enable it to attract and absorb the energy and activities of its individual members. We have seen that in a species such as man, owing to the freedom from the direct action of natural selection within the major unit, the individual's capacity for varied reaction to his environment has undergone an enormous development, while at the same time the capacity for intercommunication - upon which the co-ordination of the major unit into a potent and frictionless mechanism depends - has jagged far behind. (Trotter 1921: 157-158)

Here's that tedious "capacity for sympathy with the life and consciousness of others" (infra) again. The nationalist-globalist agendas set the point of consummation for this capacity on different units (part vs whole). Usefully, this passage reaffirms Trotter's earlier statement that "the degree of sympathy with a given individual varies directly with the amount of intercommunication with him" (p. 123; above). Neglecting the difference between "capacity for" and "amount of", we are still dealing with a (social) "relation". The "State", so to say, is the third, the transcommunicative partner, a transcendental entity.

The term "intercommunication" is here used in the very widest sense to indicate the ties that bind the individual to his fellows and them to him. It is not a very satisfactory word; but as might be expected in attempting to express a series of functions so complex and so unfamiliar to generalization, it is not easy to find an exact expression ready made. Another phrase applicable to a slightly different aspect of the same function is"herd accessibility," which has the advantage of suggesting by its first constituent the limitation, primitively at any rate, an essential part of the capacities it is desired to denote. The conception of herd accessibility includes the specific sensitiveness of the individual to the existence, presence, thought, and feelings of his fellow-members of the major unit; the power he possesses of reacting in an altruistic and social mode to stimuli which would necessarily evoke a merely egoistic response from a non-social animal - that is to say, the power to deflect and modify egoistic [|] impulses into a social form without emotional loss or dissatisfaction; the capacity to derive from the impulses of the herd a moral power in excess of any similar energy he may be able to develop from purely egoistic sources. (Trotter 1921: 158-159)

And phatic communion is "a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words" (PC 6.1), a linguistic situation in which "Each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment or other" (PC 7.8). It would appear, then, that Malinowski's "some social sentiment or other" = Trotter's "feelings of his fellow-members". One cannot help but to notice the dismissive undertone that surfaces in comparison. Hopefully Alexander Shand will provide an explanation for that.

Intercommunication, the development of which of course depends upon herd-accessibility, enables the herd the act as a single creature whose power is greatly in excess of the sum of the powers of its individual members. (Trotter 1921: 159)

A more realistic, even pragmatic, view of group mind.

Such a possible fixative action of natural selection is suggested by the fact that the appearance of mechanisms whereby the indivvidual is protected from the direct action of natural selection seems to have led to an outburst of variation. (Trotter 1921: 160)

Neat *click* - cf. the fixation of belief (Peirce).

The actual mechanism by which society, while it has grown in strength and complexity, has also grown in confusion and disorder, is that peculiarity of the gregarious mind which automatically brings into the monopoly of power the mental type which I have called the [|] stable and common opinion calls normal. This type supplies our most trusted politicians and officials, our bishops and headmasters, our successful lawyers and doctors, and all their trusty deputies, assistants, retainers, and fauthful servants. Mental stability is their leading characteristic, they "know where they stand" as we say, they have a confidence in the reality of their aims and their position, an inaccessibility to new and strange phenomena, a belief in the established and customary, a capacity for ignoring what they regard as the unpleasant, the undesirable, and the improper, and a conviction that on the whole a sound moral order is perceptible in the universe and manifested in the progress of civilization. Such characteristics are not in the least inconsistent with the highest intellectual capacity, great energy and perseverance as well as kindliness, generosity, and patience, but they are in no way redeemed in social value by them. (Trotter 1921: 160-161)

As with the political process portions of La Barre's (1954) book, this appears to serve as a near-universal descriptor. La Barre described Bernie Sandes, here we find the McDonald Trump with his unshakeable confidence in his art of the deal (really, bare opportunism), inability to read any length of text or suffer boring people to lecture, and a worldview that appears to have changed little since the 1960s when the rest of the world progressed and he was failing military academy and hustling real-estate or something.

Such a direct intelligence would take into account before all things the biological character of man, would understand that his condition is necessarily progressive along thelines of his natural endowments or downward to destruction. It would abandon the static view of society as something merely to be maintained, and adopt a more dynamic conception of statesmanhip as something active, progressive, and experimental, reaching out towards new powers for human activity and new conquests for the human will. [|] It would discover what natural inclinations in man must be indulged, and would make them respectable, what inclinations in him must be controlled for the advantage of the species, and make them insignificant. It would cultivate intercommunication and altruism on the one hand, and bravery, boldness, pride, and enterprise on the other. It would develop national unity to a communion of interest and sympathy far closer than anything yet dreamed of as possible, and by doing so would endow the national unit with a self-control, fortitude, and moral power which would make it so obviously unconquerable that war would cease to be possibility. To a people magnanimous, self-possessed, and open-eyed, unanimous in sentiment and aware of its strength, the conquest of fellow-nations would present its full futility. They would need for the acceptable exercise of their powers some more difficult, more daring, and newer task, something that stretches the human will and the human intellect to the limit of their capacity; the mere occupation and re-occupation of the stale and blood-drenched earth would be to them barbarians' work; time and space would be to them barbarians' work; time and space would be their quarry, destiny and the human soul the lands they would invade; they would sail their ships into the gulps of the ether and lay tribute upon the sun and stars. (Trotter 1921: 162-163)

The utopian vision of social control again. Notice "communion of interest and sympathy", where interest can stand for sentiments. These kinds of statements I shall have to compare with ones about religious or spiritual communion with the transcendental. Unanimous sentiment = establishing common sentiments (PC). The ending is particularly beautiful and visionary. Sentimental, even. This is how we can feel in the 21st century, after we've seen Earth from space, after we can Google Earth most streets on the planet, after we've invented the cultural Pandora's box and found innumerable virtual ways of laying tribute upon the sun and stars.

Germany in some ways resembles a son who has been educated at home, and has taken up the responsibilities of the adult, and becomes bound by them without ever tasting the free intercourse of the school and university. She has never tasted the heady liquor of political liberty, she has had no revolution, and the blood of no political martyrs calls to her disturbingly from the ground. (Trotter 1921: 164)

The highest ideal of free intercommunication. All of society should look like a campus - everyone has affordable housing and communal amenities, free high-speed internet, near-unlimited access to scientific publications, and free time to discover and develop oneself. The eternally coming age of leisure.

Generalizations about national characteristics are notoriously fallacious, but it seems that with a certain reserve one may fairly say that there is a definite contrast in this particular between the Germans and, let us say, the English. (Trotter 1921: 164b)

A simple truism.

A further and enormously potent factor in the progress of the idea was an immense accession of national feeling, derived from three almost bewilderingly successful wars, accomplished at surprisingly small cost, and culminating in a grandiose and no less successful scheme of unification. (Trotter 1921: 165)

define:accession - the attainment or acquisition of a position of rank or power (succession, elevation, assumption of, attainment of, inheritance of); a new item added to an existing collection of books, paintings, or artefacts (addition, acquisition, new item, gift, purchase, adjunct, add-on, gain). Rahvustunne on lisand, mitte põhiroog. "Alone, amongst the peoples of Europe, Germany saw herself a nation with a career" (ibid, 165). Oh, good. /s

To a nation with a purpose and a consciously realized destiny some principle of national unity is indispensable. Some strand of feeling which all can share, and in sharing which all can come into communion with one another, will be the framework on which is built up the structure of national energy and effort. (Trotter 1921: 166)

Communion? Communion! Communion...

The hive is no mere herd or pack, but an elaborate mechanisms for making use by co-ordinate and unified action of the utmost powers of the individual members. It is something which appears to be a complete substitute for individual existence, and as we have already said, seems like a new creature rather than a congeries united for some comparatively few and simple purposes. (Trotter 1921: 166b)

Mechanization? Mechanization! Mechanization...

The wolk is united for attack, the sheep is united for defence, but the bee is united for all the activities and feelings of its life. (Trotter 1921: 167)

The faint crispy smell of totalitarianism.

Socialized gregariousness is the goal of man's development. A transcendental union with his fellows is the destiny of the human individual, and it is the attainment of this towards which the constantly growing altruism of man is directed. (Trotter 1921: 167)

"Socialized gregariousness is the goal of man's development." [Citation needed] - Boy, go get the Bible.

The aggressive type was illustrated very fully by the peoples who profited by the disintegration of the Roman Empire. These northern barbarians showed in the most perfect form the lupine type of society in action. The ideals and feelings exemplified by their sagas are comprehensible only when one understands the biological significance of them. It was a society of wolves marvellously indomitable in aggression but fitted for no other activity in any corresponding degree, and always liable to absorption by the peoples they had conquered. They were physically brave beyond belief, and made a religion of violence and brutality. To fight was for them man's supreme activity. They were restless travellers and explorers, less out of curiosity than in search of prey, and they irresistibly overran Europe in the missionary zeal of the sword and torch, each man asking nothing of Fate but, after a career of unlimited outrage and destruction, to die gloriously fighting. It is impossible not to recognize the psychological identity of these ideals with those which we might suppose a highly developed breed of wolves to entertain. (Trotter 1921: 168)

The described situation calls to mind a Youtube video video about Turks invading Byzantine Empire in which the narrator compares to the way Islam worked in the caliphate to the way roman and catholic christianity worked with the vikings. Or, how Herman Sergo put it in Vihavald (1973), with swords first, missionaries after, and traders after them.

Herd instinct is manifested in three distinct types, the aggressive, the protective, and the socialized, which are exemplified by Nature by the wolf, the sheep, and the bee respectively. Either type can confer the advantages of the social habit, but the socialized is that upon which modern civilized man has developed. It is maintained here that the ambitious career consciously planned for Germany by those who had taken command of her destinies, and the maintenance at the same time of her social system, were inconsistent with the further development of gregariousness of the socialized type. New ideals, new motives, and new sources of moral power had therefore to be sought. They were found in a [|] recrudescence of the aggressive type of gregariousness - in a reappearance of the society of the wolf. (Trotter 1921: 171-172)

The maintenance of the social system makes the role of socialization very apparent. But it is hard to shake the feeling that this kind of systematizing is too "ideal", as in Max Weber. Aren't the wolf, the sheep, and the bee hive very arbitrary examples? Wouldn't we get a clearer picture from primate studies and social anthropology?

The carrying out of the commands of the herd must be in itself an absolute satisfaction in which there can be no consideration of self. Towards anything outside the herd he will necessarily be arrogant, confident, and inaccessible to the appeals of reason or feeling. This tense bond of instinct, constantly keyed up to the pitch of action, will give him a certain simplicity of character and even ingeniousness, a [|] coarseness and brutality in his dealings with others, and a complete failure to understand any motive unsanctioned by the pack. (Trotter 1921: 172-173)

What appears to be the final analysis of incuriosity.

Since the beginning of this war attracted a really concentrated attention to the psychology of the German people, it has been very obvious that one of the most striking feelings amongst Englishmen has been bewilderment. They have found an indescribable strangeness in the utterances of almost all German personages and newspapers, in their diplomacy, in their friendliness to such as they wished to propitiate, in their enmity to those they wished to alarm and intimidate. This strange quality is very difficult to define or even to attempt to describe, and has very evidently perplexed almost all writers on the war. The only thing one can be sure of is that it is there. It shows itself at times as a simplicity or even childishness, as a boorish cunning, as an incredible ant-like activity, as a sudden blast of maniacal boasting, a reckless savagery of gloating in blood, a simple-minded sentimentality, as outbursts of idolatry, not of the pallid, metaphorical, modern type, but the full-blooded African kind, with all the apparatus of idol and fetish and tom-tom, and with it all a steady confidence that these are the principles of civilization, of truth, of justice, and of Christ. (Trotter 1921: 173)

When I type into Google search, "russia is acting like", it gives the following suggestions for the search string: "like somithing struck in throat", "like he doesn't care", "like he has a hairball", "like a child", "like it wants to stall", "like enter key", "like it's out of gas", "like he can't breathe", "like a boyfriend", and "like a victim".

The incomprehensibility to the English of the whole trend of German feeling and expression suggests that there is some deeply rooted instinctive conflict of attitude between them. One may risk the speculation that this conflict is between socialized gregariousness and aggressive gregariousness. As the result of the inculcation of national arrogance and aggression, Germany has lapsed into a special type of social instinct which has opened a gulf of separation in feeling between her and other civilized peoples. Such an effect is natural enough. Nothing produces the sense of strangeness so much as differences of instinctive reaction gives to us the appearance of strangeness and queerness in the behaviour of the cat as contrasted with the dog, which is so much more nearly allied in feeling to ourselves. (Trotter 1921: 174)

That famous sympathetic closeness extended from cats and dogs to the level of nationalities.

An intense but often ingenious and even childish national arrogance is a character that strikes one at once. It seems to be a serious and often a solemn emotion impregnably armoured against the comic sense, and expressed with a childlike confidence in its justness. It is usually associated with a language of metaphor, which is almost always florid and banal, and usually grandiose and strident. This fondness for metaphor and inability to refer to common things by plain names affects all classes, from Emperor to journalist, and gives an impression of peculiar childishness. It reminds one of the primitive belief in the transcendental reality and value of names. (Trotter 1921: 176)

Sounds like pathos.

It is quite unable to understand that to be moved to rage by an enemy is as much a proof of slavish automatism as to be moved to fear by him. The really extraordinary hatred for Englnd is, quite apart from the obvious association of its emotional basis with fear, a most interesting phenomenon. The fact that it was possible to organize so unanimous a howl shows very clearly how fully the psychological mechanisms of the wolf were in action. It is most instructive to find eminent men of science and philosophers bristling and baring their teeth with the rest, and would be another proof, if such were needed, of the infinite insecurity of the hold of [|] reason in the most carefully cultivated minds when it is opposed by strong herd feeling. (Trotter 1921: 176-177)

Similar extension is applied on automatism and mechanization. In Malinowski's treatment, the issue pretends to be about speech and language when in context it has more to do with the sentiments and bonds of union ("a normal mechanism for inciting national enthusiasm and unity", ibid, 177).

In her negotiations with other people, and her estimates of national character, Germany shows the characteristic features of her psychological type in a remarkable way. It appears to be a principal thesis of hers that altruism is, for the purposes of the statesman, non-existent, or if it exists in an evidence of degeneracy and a source of weakness. The motives upon which a nation acts are, according to her, self-interest and fear, and in no particular has her "strangeness" been more fully shown that in the frank way in which she appeals to both, either alternatively or together. (Trotter 1921: 179)

America first, and the so-called border crisis. It is becoming clearer every day why so many have pointed towards Trump and uttered the F word.

How grossly, in fact, they conflict with the biological theory of gregariousness is clear enough. (Trotter 1921: 180)

I am beginning to realize that Trotter cites almost no authors. It may be that he does, in fact, rely on some earlier sources, but it is not at all clear, and, if finding some of Malinowski's sources, it coud take several years before I chance upon them. So, the biological theory of gregariousness. Certanly there are theories of human as a social animal (La Barre being a very obvious example), but it is not at all clear if Trotter's biological analogies are substiatiated enough to encourage any comparison.

Most external commentators on modern German life have called attention to the harsnes which is apt to pervade social relations. They tell us of an atmosphere of fierce competition, of ruthless scandalmongering [|] and espionage, of insistence upon minute distinctions of rank and title, of a rigid ceremonious politeness which obviously has little relation to courtesy, of a deliberate cultivation by superiors of a domineering harshness towards their inferiors, of habitual cruelty to animals, and indeed of the conscious, deliberate encouragement of harshness and hardness of manner and feeling as laudable evidences of virility. The statistics of crime, the manners of offirilas, the tone of newspapers, the ferocious discipline of the Army, and the general belief that personal honour is stained by endurance and purified by brutality are similar phenomena. (Trotter 1921: 182-183)

Another atmosphere. Curiously, it draws in several aspects of PC (rumour and politeness, for example).

Horrible as has been the crime to which we have been recalled by each of these phrases, there has never been the slightest sign that the memory of it could acquire a general currency of quotation, and by that mechanism become a stronger factor in unity determination or endurance. (Trotter 1921: 185)

An early account of memes. Discussing so-called "war cries".

The biological meaning of these peculiarities renders them intelligible and consistent with one another. The predaceous social animals in attack [|] or pursuit are particularly sensitive to the encouragement afforded by one another's voices. The pack gives tongue because of the functional value of the exercise, which is clearl of importance in keeping individuals in contact with one another, and in stimulating in each the due degree of aggressive rage. (Trotter 1921: 185-186)

Maintaining contact, huh. The whole situation appears as a spin on the growling dogs, now in a pack.

As long as such a nation is active and victorious in war, its moral resources cannot fail, and it will be capable of an indefinite amount of self-sacrifice, courage, and energy. Take away from it, however, the opportunities of continued aggression, interrupt the succession of victories by a few heavy defeats, and it must inevitably lose the perfection of its working as an engine of moral power. The ultimate and singular soirce of inexhaustible moral power in a gregarious unit is the perfection of communion amongst its individual members. (Trotter 1921: 187)

A high evaluation of communion.

The individual is gregarious by inheritance; the type according to which his gregarious reactions are manifested is not inherited, but will depend upon the form current in the herd to which he belongs, and handed down in it from generation to generation. (Trotter 1921: 197)

Nature and nurture solved.

A psychological hint of great value may be obtained from our knowledge of those animals whose gregariousness, like that of the Germans, is of the aggressive type. When it is thought necessary to correct a dog by corporal measures, it is found that the best effect is got by what is rather callously called a "sound" thrashing. The animal must be left in no doubt as to who is the master, and his punishment must not be diluted by hesitation, nervousness, or compunction on the part of the punisher. The experience then becomes one from which the dog is capable of learning, and if the sense of mastery conveyed to him is unmistakable, he can assimilate the lesson without reservation or the desire for revenge. However repulsive the idea may be to creatures of the socialized type, no sentimentalism and no pacifism theorizing can conceal the fact that the respect of a dog can be won by violence. If there is any truth in the view I have experessed that the moral reactions of Germany follows the gregarious type which is illustrated by the wolf and the dog, it follows that her respect is to be won by a thorough and drastic beating, and it is just that elementary respect for other nations, of which she is now entirely free, which it is the duty of Europe to teach her. If she is allowed to escape under conditions which in any way can be sophisticated into a victory, or, at any rate, not a defeat, she will continue to hate us as she continued to hate her victim France. (Trotter 1921: 200)

What a great narrative. In WWII, Germany finally learned that lesson, and consequently mastered the European Union. But, then, another aggressive nation was left unpunished in that conflict, and now demonstrates its lack of respect for other nations by infringing upon their sovereignty. Russian unity definitely merits an examination. I saw a thread on rutracker where a Russian speaker living in Estonia shared pictures of her capital, Tallinn. The immediate response was, "how can you speak Russian and call anything but Moscow your capital?" The questioner ignores the fact that the Russian government has made little effort to serve its citizens, instead, it has scared away its brightest people to other parts of the world.

One of the most striking phenomena which observers of the bee have noticed is the absence of any obvious means of direction or government in the hive. The queen seems to be valued merely for her functions, which are in no way directive. Decisions of policy of the greatest moment appear, as far as we can detect, to arise spontaneously among the workers, and whether the future is to prove them right or wrong, are carried out without protest or disagreement. This capacity for unanimous decisions is obviously connected with the limited mental development of the individual, as is shown by the fact that in man it is very much more feeble. In spite of this, the unanimity of the hive is wonderfully effective and surprisingly succesful. Speculators upon the physiology and psychology of bees have been forced - very tentatively of course - to imagine that creatures living in such intensely close communion are able to communicate to one another, and, as it were, to a common stock, such extremely [|] simple conceptions as they can be supposed to entertain, and produce, so to say, a communal mind which comes to have, at any rate in times of crisis, a quasi-independent existence. The conception is difficult to express in concrete terms, and even to grasp in more than an occasional intuitive flash. Whether we are to entertain such a conception or are to reject it, the fact remains that societies of a very closely communal habit are apt to give the appearance of being ruled as by a kind of common mind - a veritable spirit of the hive - although no trace of any directive apparatus can be detected. (Trotter 1921: 203-204)

The mysterious, unempirical nature of common or communal mind.

Such deeply buried combined national impulses as we are here glancing at are far removed from the influence of pacifist or jingo. Any attempt to define them must be a matter of guesswork and groping, in which the element of speculation is far in excess of the element of ascertained fact. (Trotter 1921: 206)

The collective mind is more fiction than fact.

In normal times a modern nation is made up of a society in which no regard is paid to moral unity, and in which therefore common feeling is to [|] a great extent unorganized and inco-ordinate. In such a society the individual citizen cannot derive from the nation as a whole the full satisfaction of the needs special to him as a gregarious animal. The national feeling he experiences when at home among his fellows is too vague and remote to call forth the sense of moral vigour and security that his nature demands. As has already been pointed out the necessary consequence is the segregation of society into innumerable minor groups, each constituting in itself a small herd, and dispensing to its members the moral energy that in a fully organized society would come from the nation as a whole. Of such minor herds some are much more distinct from the common body than others. Some engage a part only of the life of their members, so that the individual citizen may belong to a number of groups and derive such moral energy as he possesses from a variety of sources. Thus in a fully segregated society in time of peace the moral support of the citizen comes from his social class and his immediate circle, his proffesional associations, his church, his chapel, his trade union and his clubs, rather than directly, from the nation in which he is a unity. (Trotter 1921: 214-215)

Thus, it must be remembered nearly the whole of the foregoing was considered from a special point of view.

First among such principles is the recognition of the fact that prejudice does not display itself as such to direct introspection. One who is being [|] influenced by prejudice will never be able to detect his biassed judgments by an apparent defect in their plausibility or by any characteristic logical weakness. Agreement or disagreement with common option will as such be no help, since prejudice infests minorities no less than majorities. To suppose that when one has admitted the liability to prejudice one can free oneself from it by a direct voluntary effort is a common belief and an entirely fallacious one. (Trotter 1921: 220-221)

Another iteration of the reality check missing from introspection. See similar pronouncements by Peirce, Ruesch, and others. "Agreement and disagreement" appear in PC but now it can be connected with herd recognition.

The historical scale of events, with its narrow range, its reckoning by dinasties and parliaments, its judgments in terms of tribal censure and approbation, was found momentarily to march with the biological scale where events are measured by the survival or extinction of species, where time acquires a new meaning, and the individual man, [|] however conspicuous historically, takes on the insectlike sameness of his fellows. (Trotter 1921: 231-232)

Gross homogeneity.

The essential factor in society, is the subordination of the individual will to social needs. Our statescraft is still ignorant of how this can be made a fair and honest bargain to the individual and to the state, and recent events have convinced a very large proportion of mankind that accepted methods of establishing this social cohesion have proved to them at any rate the worst of bargains. (Trotter 1921: 241)

This looks like what Malinowski began with.

The endowment of instinct that man possesses is in every detail cognate with that of other animals, provides no element that is not fully represented elsewhere, and above all - however little the individual man may be inclined to admit it - is in no degree less vigorous and intense or less important in relation to feeling and activity than it is in related animals. This supremely important side of mental life, then, will be capable of continuous illustration and illumination by biological methods. It is on the intellectual side of mental life that man's congruity with other animals is least obvious at first sight. The departure from type, however, is probably a matter of degree only, and not of quality. Put in the most general terms, the work of the intellect is to cause delay between stimulus and response, and under circumstances to modify the direction of the latter. We may suppose all stimulation to necessitate response, and that such response must ultimately occur with undiminished total energy. The intellect, however, is capable of delaying such response, and within limits of directing its path so that it may superficially show no relation to the stimulus of which it is the discharge. (Trotter 1921: 243)

Biosemioticians would agree. Although theoretically it introduces nothing but delay between Merk and Wirk.

The significance of this rich instinctive endowment lies in the fact that mental health depends upon instinct finding a balanced but vigorous expression in functional activity. The response to instinct may be infinitely varied, and may even, under certain circumstances, be not more than symbolic without harm to the individual as a social unit, but there are limits beyond which the restriction of it to indirect and symbolic modes of expression cannot be carried without serious effects on personality. The individual in whom direct instinctive expression is unduly limited acquires a spiritual meagreness which makes him the worst possible social material. (Trotter 1921: 244)

Sounds like Herbert Spencer and "exact meaning" again.

It is the common character of large societies to suffer heavily from the restrictive effect on personality of the social instinct, and at the same time to suffer in the highest degree from the debilitation of the common social impulse. Only in the smallest groups, such as perhaps way early republican Rome, can the common impulse inform and invigorate the whole society. As the group expands and ceases to feel the constant pressure of an environment it no longer has to fear, the common impulse droops, and the society becomes segregated into classes, each of which a lesser herd within the main body and under the reciprocated pressure of its fellows, now yields to its members the social feeling which the main body [|] can no longer provide. The passage of the small, vigorous, homogeneous and fiercely patriotic group into the large, lax, segregated and ultimately decadent group is a commonplace of history. (Trotter 1921: 245-246)

It would appear that this is the public that Durkheim is thinking of (a small homogeneous group). It looks like Le Bon is unavoidable.

No nation has even succeeded in liberating the personality of its citizens from the restrictive action of the social instinct and at the same time in maintaining national homogeneity and common impulse. In a small community intercommunication among its individual members is free enough to keep common feeling intense and vigorous. As the community increases in size the general intercommunication becomes attenuated, and with this common feeling is correspondingly weakened. If there were no other mechanism capable of inducing common action than the faint social stimulus coming from the nation at large, a segregated society would be incapable of national enterprise. (Trotter 1921: 246)

This must be what Malinowski is getting at: free intercourse is no guarantee of establishing common sentiments.

Now leadership, potent as it undoubtedly is in calling forth the energy of the social instinct, is essentially a limited and therefore an exhaustible force. It depends for continued vigour upon successful enterprise. While it is succeeding there are only wide limits to the moral power it can set free and command, but in the face of misfortune and disaster its limitations become obvious, and its power inevitably declines. On the other hand, the moral power yielded by a true community of feeling, and not imposed by leadership, is enormously more resistant and even indestructible by failure and defeat. History gives many examples of the encounters of communities of these two types - the led society and the homogeneous society - and in spite of the invariably greater size and physical power of the former, frequently records the astoundingly successful resistance its greater moral vigour has given to the latter. (Trotter 1921: 247)

A theoretical abstraction of the foregoing discussion of WWI from the perspectives of England and Germany. Germany might have had aggressive and disciplined leadership but England unified more effectively against its foe.

During the war itself the submission to leadership that England showed was characteristic of the socialized type. It was to a great extent spontaneous, voluntary, and undisciplined, and gave repeated evidence that the passage of inspiration was essentially from the common people to its leaders rather than from the leaders to the common people. When the current of inspiration sets persistently in this direction, as it unquestionably did in England, it is very plain that the primitive type of leadership that has led so many civilizations to disaster is no longer in unmodified action. (Trotter 1921: 149)

Top-down and bottom-up.

Perhaps most important of all, a scientific statecraft would understand that the social instinct itself is as deep and powerful as any, and hungrily demands intense and positive gratification and expression. The social instinct drives the individual to seek union with some community of his fellows. The whole national body is in the present state of society the smallest unit in which the individual can find complete and permanent satisfaction. As long as the average man's sense of possession in the state is kept so low as it is at present, as long as the sense of moral inequality between himself and his fellows is so vigorously maintained, so long will he continue to make his class rather than his nation the object of social passion, and so long will society continue to breed within itself a principle of death. (Trotter 1921: 253)

Again, the whole national body is IMO not the smallest unit in which the individual can find complete and permanent satisfaction. Some would argue that the smallest unit would be the family. But then what is complete and permanent satisfaction? Is there such a thing?

Let us consider, for example, the intuitional doctrine of philosophic anarchism. The nucleus of truth in this is the series of perfectly sound psychological conceptions that all social discipline should be, as experienced by the individual, spontaneous and voluntary, that man possesses the instinctive endowment which renders possible a voluntary organization of society, and that in such a society order would be more effectively maintained than under our present partially compulsory system. (Trotter 1921: 253)

In the index this is marked down as the psychological basis of anarchism.

The examination of the functional satisfactoriness of society, which has been a chief object of this book, has yielded a certain general body of conclusions. (Trotter 1921: 254)

Malinowski, then, examined the functional satisfactoriness of public conversation.

Such ostensible direction as societies obtain derives its sanction from one or more of three [|] sources - the hereditary, the representative, and the official. No direction can be effective in the way needed for the preservation of socitey unless it comes from minds broad in outlook, deep in sympathy, sensitive to the new and strange in experience, capable of resisting habit, convention, and the other sterilizing influences of the herd, deeply learned in the human mind and vividly aware of the world. (Trotter 1921: 256-257)

Worldview, altruism, curiosity, and novelty. A brief summary of what I'll be paying attention to next.