LITMIR.BIZ

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standards have been introduced. Complexity is not an aesthetic criterion. It is a quality associated only with division and organisation of labour.

      Among primitives—peoples with whom economic production has not passed its early stage of food-gathering or hunting and fishing—there is less differentiation in function than among more historically-developed peoples. The only differences of importance are sexes, age-grades and marriage classes or totemic groups. Each member of the tribe can perform the social, magical and economic offices proper to his sex, age or totem, providing of course that he is not ceremonially impure or outcast. Hence it is not surprising that their formal language and their art are equally undifferentiated, and that poetry, or heightened language, is the common medium of collective wisdom.

      As to the exact process of differentiation, there is difference of opinion among anthropologists. Even the Australian aborigines possess a culture obviously resulting from a considerable period of historical development. Indeed the diffusionists see in it traces of indirect Egyptian influence. Frazer visualises the process as one by which the clever primitive appropriates to himself magical offices, and by this means becomes a priest or god-king. This view is confused, for individual cleverness could not create permanent classes, unless they played some part in the mechanism of social production. This in fact the god-king did, being an important class in agricultural organisation, but Frazer does not mention this.

      Extrapolating into the past, Durkheim sees the primitive tribe as a homogeneous unit with a group consciousness, and Levy-Bruhl regards this group consciousness as “prelogical”. Durkheim imagines such a primitive tribe to be almost entirely undifferentiated, so that one can consider the members as without character or individuality except the common impress of the tribe’s collective representations, which are coercive and overcome the individual’s free thoughts.

      This is an abstract conception, since no such homogeneous tribe can be found to-day. Abstractions of this kind are limits to which society never fully attains. If this school had a clearer idea of the connection between economic function and genetic make-up in creating characters or “types”, they would not confuse, as do so many other anthropologists, differentiation with individuation. Individual differences are genetic, the result of a particular pack of genes. Biologically speaking, they are “variations”. But social differentiation means that an individual plays a particular role in social production This differentiation may be the very antithesis of individuation, for by it the individual may be pressed into a mould—whether that of miner, bank clerk, lawyer or parson—which is bound to suppress some part of his native individuality He becomes a type instead of an individual An inherited character is forced into an acquired mould The greater the differentiation, the more specialised will be the mould and the more painful the adjustment. Psychologically, as Jung has shown, the process takes place by the exaltation of one psychic function—that most marked genetically, and therefore most likely to prove economically remunerative. The hypertrophy of this function and its accommodation to the purposes of the chosen professional type result in the wilting of the other psychic functions, which eventually become largely unconscious, and in the unconscious exercise an opposing force to the conscious personality. Hence the typical “modern” unease and neuroses Twentieth-century civilisation, the creation of a gospel of unadulterated economic individualism, has thus finally become anti-individualistic. It opposes the full development of genetic possibilities by forcing the individual to mould a favoured function along the lines of a type whose services possess exchange-value; so that for a refreshing contrast we turn (like T. E. Lawrence) to a nomad civilisation such as that of the Bedouins. Here genetic individuality, the character of a man, is most respected and most highly developed; and yet it is just here that economic differentiation is at a minimum.

      Does this mean that biological individuality is opposed to economic differentiation, and that civilisation fetters the “free” instincts—as the followers of Freud, Adler, Jung and D. H. Lawrence by implication claim? No, it is precisely economic differentiation, by the possibility of specialisation that it affords, which gives opportunity for the most elaborate development of the peculiarities or “variations” constituting the “difference” of a biological individual. But this opportunity presupposes a free choice by any individual of the complete range of economic functions. There is no such free choice in modern civilisation, because of its class structure. Not only is an individual heavily weighted in the direction of following an occupation approximately equivalent in income and cost of training to that of his parents, but also a marked bent for a slightly remunerative occupation (such as poetry) will be sacrificed to a slight bent for a markedly remunerative occupation (such as company promoting), while the career of being unemployed, the involuntary function of so many millions to-day, muffles all useful variations

      It is not civilisation as such which by its differentiation stifles genetic individuality; on the contrary, its complexity gives added scope for its development and increases the sum of “standard deviation”. One incident of civilisation—the development of classes in society and the increasing restriction of choice if function for the individual—holds back the very development of individuality which the existing productive forces could allow in a more fluid system of social relations. Capitalism, by making all talents and gifts a commodity subject to the inexorable and iron laws of the “free” market, now restrains that free development of the individual which its vast productive forces could easily permit, if released. This gives rise to the complaints of the instincts tortured by civilisation which are investigated by Freud, Jung and Adler.

      It is not surprising that a civilisation in which this rigidity has become pathological and individuality has almost vanished—as in the declining Egyptian and Roman Empires—collapses before “barbanans” at a lower stage of economic production in which, however, individuality has a freer rein. This class rigidity is itself the reflection of a complete disintegration of the economic foundations of a culture, in which the productive forces, like men’s imprisoned characters, are wasting themselves in a sterile quarrel with the iron fetters of obsolete social relations.

      Durkheim’s conception of a tribe whose consciousness is solid crystal and undifferentiated, corresponding to its undifferentiated economy, in its absoluteness misses the significance of genetic individuality as the basis of economic differentiation, just as the conception of the instincts of civilised man fighting the constraints of society ignores the importance of economic differentiation as a fruitful outlet for individuality. Biologists will notice here a significant parallel to the famous dispute on their own science over “acquired” and “innate” characters.

      Durkheim distinguishes the collective representations of the tribe which constitute its collective mind, from individual representations which constitute the individual mind, because of the coercive character of the former This error is only the fundamental error of contemporary philosophy which, by its false conception of the nature of freedom, continually generates the same stale antithesis. The consciousness made possible by the development of society is not by its nature coercive; on the contrary this consciousness, expressed in science and art, is the means whereby man attains freedom. Social consciousness, like social labour, of which it is the product and auxiliary, is the instrument of man’s freedom. And it is not the instincts un-adapted by society which are of their essence free; on the contrary the unmodified instincts deliver man into the slavery of blind necessity and unconscious compulsion.

      Yet social consciousness is sometimes telt by men as coercive—why is this? Because it is a consciousness which no longer represents social truth; because it is no longer generated freely in the whole process of social co-operation. Such a consciousness is the product of a class antagonism; it is the consciousness of a class which by the development of the division of labour and absolute property-right has become isolated from economic production, and is therefore maimed and obsolete. This consciousness now becomes the bulwark of privilege instead of the spontaneous expression of social fact, and must therefore be coercively enforced on the rest of society. Durkheim does not see that this coercive type of group consciousness is least common with a primitive people, and most common with a sophisticated civilisation.

      We cannot help noticing already the connection of early poetry—poetry which is also tribal wisdom and rude chronology—with a state of society in which economic differentiation due to division of labour

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