Richard Sale has written an intelligent essay upon the diseased state of the public mind of Americans: The Menace of the Crowd. Wikipedia has a stub article about Richard Sale (journalist).
Sale’s essay was published on the website, Sic Semper Tyrannis, run by “Colonel W. Patrick Lang [who] is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (The Green Berets).”
Sale is looking for the more general truths behind the morally irresponsible attitudes of Americans to Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin, those attitudes being stirred up into a nasty froth most recently after the civilian airliner MH-17 was shot down from the skies over a war-zone in eastern Ukraine. We know little though the American government has made accusations against Russia and Putin without supplying evidence. We have to remember that this is the same government which lied on important matters in Syria, that is, lied in a criminal manner. Both the President and his Secretary of State, as well as some junior members of this administration, have also shot off their mouths or acted in an irresponsible and juvenile manner on numerous occasions on important matters and when dealing with adults from countries which were once willing to be friendly toward us.
This moral irresponsibility and immaturity on the part of American leaders wouldn’t be possible if the American people were themselves morally responsible and mature. If we were better people, we would have better leaders or would call bad leaders to account if we made mistakes in the voting booths. What gives? Sale tells us:
So what you see happening today is the transformation of individual convictions that become overwhelming in force because they are repeated endlessly by those in authority. The cautious restrictions of what once was called, “Iron objectivity” had been discarded as too ineffectual and cumbersome. Few in the media have the intellectual or moral strength to resist what is told them by their leaders. The collectivities have the habit of drowning anything that is private and not collective.
To put it differently, the first causality of a crowd is the loss of its reason, the loss of its ability to weigh and estimate events. One of their greatest fears of a crowd, of people who think in unison, is to be seen as being moderate and sensible. It used to be that moral contagion acted slowly, moving cautiously, but now thanks to social media, the public’s worst instincts are not only let loose, they are praised and glorified.
So a crowd, as Sale uses the term, is what some call a mob and that is a gathering of individual human beings who may possess at least modest levels of individual intelligence but, as a group or a `crowd’, they have a very low quality of intellect—communal mind (see Intelligence vs. Intellect). The mob-thoughts or crowd-thoughts are hardly rational and often lead to harm to the members of the crowd itself as well as to its intended victims.
A human community can take the form of a marauding band of sports fans or a lynch mob or a mass of those with minds like silly putty (see Unreliable Memories, Minds Like Silly Putty). Sale refers to the silly-putty crowd. A truer community can be seen in a company of Green Berets or the history faculty of a small liberal-arts college or a society of medical specialists or a collective of pottery craftsmen or a church community or the workforce of a small machine shop or any of a variety of human beings who gather into a community in an adult manner for a legitimate reason, even if only to play cribbage once a week. These better sorts of community have a part of the greater intellect which is the true core of a civilization and, thus, a share in the ultimate, complete and perfect, intellect which is that of the Body of Christ. I’m early in the process of developing adequate ways to discuss matters such as this: why is it that sometimes human communities, even temporary gatherings, develop in a healthy and morally well-ordered form and sometimes they become lynch mobs. In the past, such matters were just discussed as if being a “way of the world,” but I’m trying to follow through on the modern program recommended by Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger):
Modernity is not simply a historically-datable cultural phenomenon; in reality it requires a new focus, a more exact understanding of the nature of man.
[Pope Benedict XVI, in a speech given on 2008/06/07 to participants in the sixth European Symposium of University Professors, which was held in Rome from 2008/06/04 to 2008/06/07 on the theme: “Broadening the Horizons of Reason. Prospects for Philosophy”.]
For now, I’ll stick to more traditional ways of writing and speaking than those I’m trying to develop from the stuff of the Bible and the geometric reasoning of modern physics and other peculiar regions of human thought and action. Even now, my ways of writing and speaking are enriched to consider a few important insights from modern empirical knowledge and also to bring back into consideration the strong Pauline view of the Body of Christ.
The American people don’t have much of an intellect at all, not the intellect or communal mind of any civilization which could be labeled `Christian’ nor even one much like that of a virtuous pagan civilization. We are, as a people, primitive and morally unordered; we pretend to be freestanding individuals even as evolutionary biologists and neurobiologists have joined historians, sociologists, and the better sort of Christian philosophers and theologians in seeing that men are bound in communal life. I prefer to avoid half-hearted words and just claim we human beings have both individual and communal being—as do probably most animals but certainly all social animals. (This expansion in the definition of created being should be plausible in light of the expansion of being by modern scientists to include relationships; some of the Old Testament authors and St John the Evangelist were there first—see Einstein and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality: and Quantum Mechanics and Moral Formation: Part 1.)
My view of human being is richer and more complex than the view Sale seems to assume. My view allows better ways to state the problems we face and far better ways to analyze and understand those problems. I’m going to push hard on an expansion of our understanding of created being, so that we begin to acknowledge that relationships are primary over stuff and that there is both individual and communal human being. I’ve developed this worldview in numerous books and weblog essays—see my main website: Acts of Being. Ultimately, our social beings, forming and participating in all our social groupings in this mortal realm, reach their completeness and perfection when we become truly Christ, that is, when each of the human beings saved by Christ becomes the Body of Christ while remaining his or her individual self. This is analogous to God Himself: three Persons who remain fully three individual Persons while also being fully one God.
Therefore, I think Sale’s comments are valid but he uses a set of words and concepts which leave him writing as if a crowd is inherently bad rather than a disordered, or at least poorly ordered, form of something good—a true community. I would suggest we can better understand the underlying problems caused by defective or immature human communities when we recognize the reality of communal human being as well as individual human being. As we recognize a street thug as a stunted and deformed human being, a pietistic peasant as an immature Christian, a schizophrenic as a human being with a damaged mind, we can see a crowd as human communal being which is defective or incomplete or immature in some significant sense.