All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking in a groupthink? I want to set up my answer to that question by discussing first the difference between calculation and wisdom.
It doesn't require discernment to determine that 2 + 2 = 4. You just need a mind that operates in a mechanically logical way. And in our day-to-day life a lot of what passes for wisdom is really calculation in this sense--it's automatic and mechanical: "The wise person reads his Consumer Reports before making a purchase decision." Obviously some calculations are more complicated than others because more factors than price and practicality may enter into consideration, but I tend to roll my eyes when someone claims that his decision is purely data driven, as if no judgement or interpretation of the data entered into it. Having accurate data is important, but It's the judgment and interpretation of them where the wisdom lies.
So what I mean by wisdom comes into view in situations that require a weighing of alternatives for which no calculus offers an answer. It requires something else--discernment, and the discernments of the truly wise lead them to make good judgments that prove themselves correct time after time. That contrasts with the poor judgments consistently made by those whose judgments are based on the groupthink of a conventional wisdom, which more often than not goes off the tracks. The decision making that led to the invasion of Iraq comes to mind.
I would argue that not all groupthink is bad. The tribal wisdom handed down from generation to generation in vibrant traditional societies was real and lifegiving. In such societies there is an experience of the living presence of the wisdom of the ancestors. And one could say that the life of the tradition is the soul of a culture, and it's that soul or ancestral mind that thinks in the people in a living traditional culture. But a tradition that no longer conveys in a living way the mind of the ancestors is a failed tradition. The tradition no longer functions as the medium through which its members experience cognitive moments that reveal the inner content of the traditional formulations. The formulations, as a consequence, become empty and rigid.
But when we try to understand the nature of wisdom, there is a difference between sophia and phronesis. Phronesis is the practical wisdom we call prudence; sophia is a different kind of wisdom which derives from inspiration, from moments when something divine or sacred breaks into our everyday experience. Living traditional societies were 'porous' enough so that these events were more frequent. Secular materialist societies are structured to make them rare. These events are what I mean by cognitive moments, which are close to what Heidegger meant by his term 'ereignis'--an aletheia event, a moment when Being discloses itself. Forgotten Being reveals itself and one finds a way to relate to it--to align one's life with it--authentically. It's rare enough when these events occur in secular materialist societies, but even when they do, they are often misinterpreted.
A tradition that no longer discloses the sacred and finds a way to align its collective life with it is no longer a living tradition. It's in this sense that Nietzsche was right in describing our condition as moderns by saying not just that God was dead, but that we moderns killed him. It's not a statement so much about God as about how modern consciousness has lost its capacity to naturally and easily experience the sacred. Moderns, to use the Heideggerian phrase, have forgotten Being--they live now in a sterile world of things. We even have to fight hard to think of people as something other than things. For souls shaped by such a world, the sacred rarely discloses itself. But conservatives are wrong to think that we should pass policies in the political sphere that will align with traditional practices that no longer have life.
Already for the literate Athenians in Socrates' time, a "Being-mediating" traditional consciousness was withering away, and with it the traditional forms were starting to rigidify into sterile groupthink. Socrates' demployment of his deconstructive 'elenchus', was his attempt to clear away the dead wood to open up a space for Being to reveal itself. Socrates pushed his interlocutors to move from naive, unconscious acceptance of conventional wisdom to aporia--a condition of 'knowing ignorance' promoted in Plato's early dialogues, a condition which clears the way for a deeper cognitive apprehension of Being.
I'd argue that Plato's 'anamnesis' or 'remembering' is a different way of talking about the same movement in consciousness to which Heidegger's 'ereignis'. (Forgetfulness, after all, is the central problem for H.) I'm also inclined to think that Plato's theory of the forms derived from an experience or intuition of Being--an aletheia moment, which he later tried to make sense of in rational terms with unsatisfactory results. I'd argue that the Christian Neoplatonists develop more satisfactorily what he began, but that's another discussion.
So authentic appropriation of traditional wisdom requires a cognitive, "numinous" moment in which the sacred character of the traditional wisdom reveals itself, and this contrasts with modern traditionalism which accepts social norms as ends in themselves rather than as a means to something more important. Such "cognitive moments" are not impossible in our world, but they are much harder to come by in pluralistic, tradition-dead societies that shape the human soul by its crude, materialistic sensibility.
It used to be the goal of a liberal, humanistic education to help us "remember" Being. Poetry is the primary linguistic form that seeks to disclose being, but it's boring for most of us now because our capacity to have Being revealed to us has all but withered away. And as a result wisdom is in short supply. We have lots of people with good heads, but dried-out souls; many who are good calculators, but few who are sophia wise.
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So the healthy groupthink of living tradition is rare or nonexistent in modern pluralistic, choice-centered societies in which any sense of living tradition is a distant memory. And as a result we hold on to traditional forms that have no living content, and the forms rigidify as do the souls ensnared by them. In politics and business social calculation substitutes for wisdom. When we complain that the media pundits or politicians no longer speak the truth, it's because these people are members of a courtier class possessed by the spirit of social calculation. They have become incapable of the kind of independent judgments that distinguish what is true from what is false, and when if someone actually speaks the truth, the courtiers immediately reduce it to terms of social, economic, or political calculation.
These courtiers have themselves been coopted by a calculating groupthink, so it has become impossible for them to think anything else is possible. Social calculation is the only thing they understand because it consumes them, and it's the primary skill that propelled them into the prominent positions they occupy. And the system selects and promotes only those who distinguish themselves as prodigies of social calculation. It's another way of saying that the people who set the agenda and shape the conventional wisdom or groupthink in this society are soul sick.
Now the people who subject all traditional wisdom to the Socratic test and find it completely unacceptable are called cynics. Cynics are either disappointed idealists embittered by the failure of the world to live up to their naive expectations, or they are extreme rationalists for whom everything is rational calculation. For the latter group the phrase 'cognitive moment' as I speak of it here is meaningless.
Skepticism is different from cynicism. Skepticism as aporia it is a first step toward wisdom, but it becomes cynicism when it refuses to take the next step, which requires the acknowledgment of the logic of the heart or logic of the suprarational. Heart logic is what opens us up to cognitive moments. It is our an innate capacity to think in a non-calculative way and as such a prerequisite for wisdom, but it remains dormant in many, a seed waiting to germinate. It is no longer awakened in us automatically as it was in living traditional societies.
If such moments occur in our society, they are individual experiences, not group experiences. And so, as described above, the more typical kind of groupthink that arises in tradition-dead societies is an empty, lifeless formalism, and as such an emptiness vulnerable to be filled by various seductions. Like a vacant house on a rundown city block, groupthinks often find themselves occupied by squatters that make a bad situation worse. So back to the question in the first paragraph: Q: What thinks in a groupthink? A: In tradition-dead societies psychic complexes fill the empty forms and perform a compulsive kind of thinking that infects the group with collective mental illness. The degree of mental illness is measured by the degree a society is alienated from Being. We see this alienation in religious cults; we see it in political movements; and we see it in the media, and in the inanity of fashion, celebrity, and consumer fads. It's everywhere, and because it's everywhere we think it's real. It's not; it's nuts. (See my pieces on Zombie Traditionalism that explore this theme further.)
A conversation is not possible between two people who are possessed by the "demons" animating tradition-dead groupthink. It's not possible even if only one of the two interlocutors is possessed. Such people only make calculations about whether what the other says meets their litmus test for orthodoxy. A real conversation is possible only between two people who have the mutual intent to have a cognitive moment with one another--when both are open for the revelation in the Other of the sacred. Everything else is chatter, and chatter has its place. But our intersubjective experience is for most of us the last place where our capacity to recognize the sacred has not completely withered. We experience Love in the presence of the sacred. And so if other people have been occasions of the disclosure of the sacred and the awakening of 'real' love, other beings can also be the occasion for such disclosures. And that's the task, to extend our capacity for experiencing the sacred by increasing our capacity for love, even ultimately for the hated Other, the enemy.
This is a cultural and not a political, task, but it has political implications insofar as it shapes our political discourse. Because two people in the grip of opposing groupthinks cannot possibly communicate with one another. In order for such cognitive moment to occur in the political sphere, both parties have to be open to the Other's disclosing something 'real'. But if neither party has anything but groupthink truisms to parrot, no cognitive moments are possible. The culture wars, as we have experienced them in this country, at least since the time of the Scopes trial, are like two crazy people trying to have conversation. Neither is in his right mind. Neither is capable of true judgment. All they can do is shout at one another. The best one can do is create the conditions for an opening by refusing to be sucked into the left/right groupthink polarity. (Listen to this podcast interview with Douglas Johnston for an example of someone who seeks to create this kind of opening with Muslims.)
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Now the groupthinks of the political left and the right, insofar as either is unconsciously assimilated, infect individuals as a kind of naive idealism. And insofar as it is naive, i.e., lacking the "cognitive moment' described above, it is innocent and well-intentioned, but empty. And insofar as it is empty, it is a vacuum ready to suck in anything that will enliven it. Demagogues are con men who understand how this process works, and they are masters who feed off of the naive idealism of either the left or the right. They don't care about traditional values, and they don't care about ideals; they only care about concentrating power under their control. And they understand that their ability to consolidate power requires that they manipulate the naive groupthink of a majority of the public. If they can control the majority groupthink, they can simply dismiss the concerns of the minority. They know how to work with Resentment and Arrogance to achieve their ends.
Maintaining power by manipulating groupthink was Orwell's great theme. The demagogue drapes everything he does in idealistic or obfuscating language, and those for whom those words have no living cognitive content simply accept the new content that the demagogues fill them with. And the next thing you know, the words have no relationship to their original meanings. They are old wine skins filled with new wine, wine whose purpose is to addle the minds of the cognitively naive. What thinks in the Orwellian groupthink is the mind of Big Brother, which is the mind of the demagogue. This is our social evolution: From a groupthink that thinks the wisdom of the ancestors to a groupthink that thinks the nihilism of the Powermad.
The point is this: The power hungry feed off naive idealistic groupthink, which they are very skilled at manipulating. It doesn't matter if it's the utopian idealism of the left or the traditionalist idealism of the right. Demagogues care only about manipulating whichever naive groupthink will best serve their purposes. This is Orwell's insight. Left, right--it doesn't matter. But in this country, at this time, they are working the empty, naive idealism of the traditionalist right. And their basic strategy is to incite traditionalist resentment toward the secular liberal elites, who play into this strategy by disdaining traditionalist concerns as foolish.
Their concerns are not foolish, but naive traditonalists are indeed foolish to the degree they allow themselves to be manipulated by demagogues who pretend to care about those concerns. But so are the secular liberals foolish insofar as they are unable to transcend the toxicity of the left/right polarity. Both sides need some tough-love slaps upside the head to snap the spell and bring them back to what's real. So-called moderate strategies to split the difference between the polarities can't work because they accept the insanity of the system as normative.
An intervention is called for, and it will come in the form of catastrophe if we don't find another way. 9/11 was Reality's warning shot across the bow, and we took all the wrong lessons from it. But one way or the other, something from outside the system will be introduced, something that will bring us back to reality, and then it's a matter of enough people recognizing and working with it. But more important in the short run is having enough people to say No to demagogic manipulation. Its groupthink has to be seen through, deconstructed, so that a space can be cleared for something real to disclose itself.
[I thought it might be interesting in this moment to repost this entry, slightly edited to clarify some of technical philosophical terminology, from July 2007. If this interests you, the discussion in comments on the original post (when I was more active on this blog) is pretty lively.]