See the article, Notable: Bigger groups make less social time for red colobus, at John Hawk’s website. [I had a problem linking properly to this article but it can be found under “Stories” if it doesn’t come up on the front page. I will adjust my link when possible.]
Professor Hawks discusses an article summarizing research on troops of red colobus monkeys in Uganda. The research article provides empirical evidence that, for this particular primate, greater group size can reduce socializing because of the greater need to move about to gather food. For monkeys as well as men, there are only 24 hours in the day. Think of this trivial truth in light of a complex human community where “making a living” covers a lot of ground, education when young and, at various times and in various ways, participation in the lives of overlapping communities of a political or economic or religious or cultural nature.
I’ll move to more speculative realms of thought, seeing what can be made of this empirical data within the context of my Christian understanding of monkeys, of men, of this world, of all of Creation.
Of course, the obvious difference between men and monkeys is that men supposedly are more rational and can work to make their lives better in various ways. Obvious, maybe in theory and in the practice of better ages and better communities than those of the modern West. Not so obvious in light of the growing incoherence in the political and economic and other communities of the West, including that community which is Western Civilization itself.
The world is too much with us. There are only 24 hours in the day and we are given only our three-score and ten years on earth. We must make choices and set priorities. Are we to be active political animals? Are we to be devoted to demanding careers? (This latter was, and sometimes is, more possible for men in ages or social groupings where the wife takes on the role of building and maintaining family and other relationships as well as running the household.)
Though it might be coming to an end very soon, modern men of the West have been rich enough to be able to afford to waste much time (not in the useful way of creative writers or artists) and to teach their children that they can go to school for seven hours a day and practice/play a demanding sport a couple hours a day and play the guitar another two hours and watch three hours of videos each evening and spend many hours on their cell-phone and… Then you can look at the school-day and see it is typically a smear of diluted learning and shallow socializing and the satisfying of bureaucratic rules and… There’s always time to do many things and much time to play our roles as vulnerable consumer widgets but not enough time to do the important things right—which often means intensely.
There have been some strange life-styles made possible, though only for a decade or two in all likelihood. Think of all those people, mostly but not all young, who seem to ignore all traditional and more earthly forms of socializing to engage in socializing by way of cell-phones or video games or Facebook and similar stuff.
Speculatively: I think that, faced with the need to choose activities, modern human beings—at least those of the West—have chosen a way of socializing that numbs them rather than truly engaging them in a rich, complex human life. Deeper engagement in careers in science or art or literature or house-building or teaching is sacrificed, often under pressure from exploitive political or economic systems. I’ve read testimony that some in the younger generation have good formal skills in many areas and show no real life inside of them—they make better physics students than physicists in one such testimony, at least so long as being a student is defined in terms of textbook learning and the corresponding tests.
Within our limited lives, many make their choices according to this pretense that each of us can be whatever we want and we can be that soon. In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of damage being done to individuals and communities by the shallow sorts of men and women who had taken to this world devoted to feel-good busyness rather than to accomplishment. In particular, a great deal of harm has been done by the ambitious but mostly untalented human beings who have chosen to devote themselves to careers and volunteer-works which allow them power over human communities and human individuals. Politics, in the United States and other Western countries, is dominated by those with little in the way of knowledge or intelligence or the intellectual skills which can help the less-intelligent to function by way of thoughts and rules of behavior developed by the great thinkers and doers of a human community and filtered through communal consensus. (For my use of `intellect’, see Intelligence vs. Intellect and—for the greater context of a complete human nature— Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?. Better still, download my book on the subject: A More Exact Understanding of Human Being.)
In a world where human beings tend to be busy rather than engaged, those with the talents of being busy dominate over those who might do their work in more appropriate ways only to emerge from, say, their cubicle at CIA with an intelligent analysis of the shooting down of flight MH17 over the Ukraine only to find the busy little bees have already set a disastrous policy in place. It doesn’t take long for a busy little bee to generate a flashy presentation using all sorts of graphics, to-do lists, and have-done lists.
How have we arrived at so basically incoherent an understanding of human nature? How have we constructed human communities so fundamentally incoherent? How have we built so many political and economic and cultural communities and institutions dominated by those not good at much except acting beyond their competence? By way of what I call “the poisons of individualistic ideologies.” As I will explain in the essay I plan to finish and publish soon, a creature both individualistic and communal which pretends to be radically and almost solely individualistic will greatly deform itself; that deformed creature will live in small-scale communities partly deformed but at least somewhat conforming to human nature; these deformed individuals and small-scale communities will start to gather together in ways which seem voluntary and, in any case, correspond poorly to the needs and legitimate desires of better-formed individuals and small-scale communities (such as families and economic groups). The resulting large-scale communities might well be absolute disasters, as is true of the economic and political communities of the West.
From there, our communities at all scales will grow still more incoherent and the individuals in those communities will be more deeply deformed over the years. Until the breaking point comes. And it might be almost here for the West.