A body politic: the nature of ‘we’

How does a collective entity come to register harm as imminent? Do the participants experience a mind-meld and group emotion in the face of some (real/imagined?) danger? In focusing on the perspective of ‘a people’, we raise complex questions about the nature of the feeling/judging eye. While the experience is felt by individuals, those persons conceive, feel, and interpret the harm applying not directly to themselves as separate individuals but to themselves as members of a collective self and body, either a national body or an emergent group to which they belong or with which they identify. ‘We’ process the substance of a threat. I want to consider two approaches, which each offer necessary parts of an answer to the question of the mental state of individuals as members of a ‘we’. Social identity theory (SIT) and plural subject theory contribute different tools for understanding how a collective point of view motivates members of the group.

Work in social psychology, specifically SIT, established a paradigm for social scientists to explore processes like prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, ethnocentrism, social mobility, and group conflict. More recently, political scientists as well have used SIT to provide the micro-foundations of political group identification (see, for instance, Jonathan Mercer 1995; Theiler 2003; Moses 2009). Henri Tajfel (1970) famously showed in a series of experiments with English school boys that discriminatory behavior occurs to support a ‘minimal group’, the basis of which may be utterly arbitrary and random, such as estimations of the number of dots on a series of slides; individuals were assigned to the overestimation or underestimation group. Affinity with this meaningless division generated group favoritism when subjects were asked to allocate resources. SIT (and Tajfel's later work) moved on from what Tajfel labeled a generic norm of outgroup discrimination to explore other socio-psychological dynamics of social functioning. The most salient feature of SIT remains the imputation of a psychological disposition within individual cognition and emotion to internalize the perspective of groups(s) with which persons come to associate and then identify, and to behave in a group-oriented direction. Nevertheless, as Tajfel has emphasized, social psychology cannot explain political or group conflict.10 The observation that individuals discriminate against other collectivities does not show us how a shared point of view of harm arises.

Jonathan Mercer (1995), in his influential article ‘Anarchy and Identity’, develops an answer to the question of the causal link between SIT and threat at the level of political bodies. Persons as members of a group seek to invest their group identity with self-esteem, which makes other groups competitors in a continual struggle for superior validation (cf. Mercer 1995, 242). The logic is: groups compare, comparison leads to desire for status superiority, this generates competition, hence conflict. For him the theoretical result ratifies a version of realism in that state identity is inherently zero sum. He underscores a direct link between group identity and state behavior: states need positive social identity in the same way that individual people do – ‘a group – however constituted – will be egoistic’ (p. 249). We have to ask, why, at a psychological level, would a need for self-esteem necessarily require demotion or domination of the other? Hegel's master–slave dialectic presented a logic of identity construction and self-esteem as developing toward the ascription of positive value to the Other who grants one recognition; we do so in order to validate the validation one might say. Importantly, we should reject the analogizing of a state to an identity group. All groups and political associations are not alike when it comes to how persons attach themselves, feel and reason as members. Groups have different structures and operate for diverse purposes in myriad contexts. He ignores the essential fact that political institutions and situations transform human drives and motivations, which is precisely why they are established – not simply to pass along tendencies but to reshape and channel them.11

SIT and its applications offer a method for linking the individual mind and its energies to social forms and function by recognizing the emotional and agency-giving nature of the individual's attachment to group categories as he/she strives to make sense of the world. But, an individual's internalization of a group identity – the creation of a particular ‘we’ inside one's mind – does not explain when an encounter between individuals so grouped will come to be perceived as dangerous.12 The inclination to form groups is as much a part of the solution to human conflict as it is a source of that conflict. Groupism may be an evolutionary trait contributing to the survival of complex social interaction as much (perhaps more) than it is conflict-inducing. There is no inevitability to the genesis of threat purely from the psychological need to categorize groups. The basic problem comes from portraying the objective of the ‘we’ point of view as primarily a matter of self-definition (identity) and comparative status.

Another way to understand the perspective of the social group – the requirements and needs driving people as members – is available through conceptual work on collective agency and the plural self. Margaret Gilbert (2006) elaborates a set of concepts to make sense of our everyday language, which takes collective entities as real sources of motivation and action orientation. Her recent work seeks to ground a theory of political obligation through plural subject theory. What I want to take from her work is the description of the collective entity that undergirds the theory of obligation. The basic logic runs as follows: our natural human behavior leads us to engage in ‘acting together’ to achieve goals that cannot be reached individually. Two or more persons collectively espouse a goal and act together as a body in light of it. They share knowledge that they are so engaged in a unified purposive way, and thus constitute a social group, or plural subject. They are jointly committed to uphold their common goals as members of the collective body they have created.13

The virtue of this line of research comes from the emphasis it places on common action and shared goals as the basis of the ‘we’. This commits persons to something beyond a myopic concern with identity, and renders them interdependently oriented toward objective features of the world. A ‘we’ entity perceives the world as more than a cognitive environment for discrimination. Specifically, her description of political society emphasizes the orientation of group perception toward generalizable features of the society. ‘The plural subject account of social rules constitutes…a version of the “imperative theory of norms” in which these are regarded as “imperatives issued by a society to itself”. The account also accords with the idea that social rules have the authority of society behind them’ (p. 200). Her incisive description provides a way to think about the value for persons of the nature and necessity of group membership. One's collective status enables the world to be organized in productive forms. ‘We’ care about how the world works. This approach underscores what I take to be essential in threat perception for a group: normative order. A political body is comprised of a plurality of persons and individuals who come together to achieve order, to which they ascribe legitimacy. The body so constituted cares about a collective state of the world, part of which is the maintenance of a distinct identity, but which cannot be reduced to that identity. Perception of threat will be filtered through the body politic's need to achieve a state of the world, part and parcel of which must be the group's capacity for agency in that world.

SIT and plural subject theory helped conceptualize the collective point of view orienting members of a group. One stressed the image of the larger self (identity) internalized within each individual, while the other stressed the collective goal(s) and beliefs about the state of the world, which orient persons to meaningfully participate in, indeed constitute, a collective entity. I have not tried to make these approaches agree on a core conception of ‘we’ thinking; they tackle the problem from different angles, and enable us to locate where harm to a collectively constituted body will be felt. The question then is: how will acts, events and other groups in the environment come to be perceived by persons as endangering their capacity to be that jointly committed and active body and to live in a world hospitable to their conception of right order?

What do the people care about? Commitment to normative order

Physical harm, strategic competition, and identity difference do not provide sufficient accounts of what people – viewed as a political body – see as a threat. The element of order must be brought in. In his book on Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch observes, ‘great and sustained destruction requires great ambition. It must be conceived as the means toward achieving a new order’ (1998, 17). Order is as elemental to human society as oxygen to human life; yet, it has not received sufficient direct attention in studying the genesis of conflict.14 How is order a value that people feel and fight for? I argue that perceptions of threat emerge when a political group takes its order as under attack. I develop that claim through presenting the following: (a) a definition of order as functional and normative; (b) the importance of beliefs about right order (normative order); and (c) additional dimensions of normative order: internal/external and retrospective/prospective. In the fourth section, I examine types of harm and emotional facets pertaining to normative order. People affirm a commitment to the order of their group and to certain basic rules about how humans should act. Acts, events, and other groups that appear intentionally to undermine core normative commitments stand thereby as threats to which the group must respond. Thus, threat is a test of a group's reality through its rallying of emotion and commitment of its members.