We like to think that belonging to a particular group will give us a sense of security, but groups, like everything else in the universe, are changing all the time. A group of friends have life stories which overlap and intertwine, but as time passes the stories change, both in their present circumstances and in their expectations. Then the group might not survive. A television documentary on BBC2 called Modern Times: Friends2 captured some of the tensions in a group of friends who, as thirtysomethings, led a very enjoyable social life. Now the threat and the promise of marriage loomed. One man said, ‘It’s difficult for men. The pressure is on for men to stay a player for as long as possible. There used to be pressure to marry and settle down. Now the pressure is to stay a player.’
Another man said that his friends are ‘a big cushion behind you all the time. If you fail yourself you’ve got these friends to back you up.’
One woman said of her boyfriend, ‘He uses the group of friends as a marker. That’s made it difficult for me to move on in our relationship as I would like.’
The men showed a great need to hang on to their youth. They were unable to decide whether this period of their life was over and that they must move on. The women knew it was time to move on. They were strong and wanted children, and they could, and probably would, inveigle the men into getting married and settling down, but if they did this they were likely to be dissatisfied because their man had not made the decision to change himself but had merely drifted, tugged along by her. He had shown himself, in the last analysis, to be weak, indecisive, childish, and in time she might come to despise him.
How easily a man goes from being ‘a player’ to being ‘a married man’ depends on how he defines ‘a player’ and ‘a married man’. Does he define ‘a player’ as ‘what a man should always be’ or as ‘a good experience, but something you have to grow out of?
How we define our groups determines what we do in them.
Defining Yourself and Your Group
To know something we have to know its opposite. To define something we have to define what is not that something. Thus we define our groups in terms of those who are excluded from them. The group ‘golfers’ is defined by those who do not play golf. If everybody played golf we would not need a group called ‘golfers’. We do not talk about ‘breathers’ because everybody who is alive breathes but we do talk about ‘drivers’ because not everyone drives a car. When asked to define Britain the film-maker Terry Jones said, ‘We are set apart as Britons by our lack of French-ness, German-ness or Italian-ness.’3
No doubt, if asked to list the groups to which we belong, each of us could produce quite a few. However, some of these groups would be no more than collections of people with whom we occasionally spend some time while other groups would be an integral part of our identity. These groups are usually those of gender, family, race, religion and nationality, but all these categories are not necessarily applicable to everyone. If someone calls me an atheist I can only reply that I am an atheist only in the same way as I am an ‘a-fairy-ist’ or an ‘a-Father-Christmas-ist’. When the broadcaster Jon Snow was asked if he was British he said, ‘I think that Britishness has died off in my lifetime and nothing has replaced it. When I was a child it was Winston Churchill, beefeaters and lots of pink on the globe. Now it’s an irrelevant concept. Personally, I’m a Londoner living in Europe.’4
The groups which we join only transiently we can usually define very simply – ‘the crowd I drink with on Friday nights’, ‘the people who live in my street’, ‘the guys with me at college’, but the groups which are part of our identity, while they might have simple labels like ‘Church of England’ or ‘Australian’, have complex definitions which are difficult to make entirely explicit. ‘Australian’ might mean anyone who carried an Australian passport but it also means a wide range of different attributes. Recently my son sent me two videos made by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. One was the film The Castle, a funny, sentimental story about a family whose home was to be requisitioned for an airport extension, and the other a set of four episodes of the satirical series Frontline about a television current affairs team in Melbourne. The family whose home was their castle were all loving, kind, tolerant and simple-minded to the point of stupidity. The television team were murderously competitive, hurtful and cynical, with an intelligence used only for self-interest. Yet both the film and the series were an accurate representation of what I would recognize as Australian.
A complex definition of our group allows us to align ourselves with certain aspects of our group and to distance ourselves from other aspects. We can claim to have all the virtues of our group and none of the vices. Primitive pride can make good use of this ploy whenever certain events threaten our meaning structure. Primitive pride is not wedded to truth or logic, and so, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa revealed more and more of the abuses of the apartheid era, those who had benefited from that era did not reject their group but continued to claim its virtues while denying that they ever knew that such atrocities had occurred. When F. W. de Klerk was in the UK to promote his autobiography he told BBC Radio Four listeners that, on the one hand, his government had done much to promote the welfare of blacks and, on the other hand, he had known nothing of what happened at Vlakplaas, a farm near Pretoria which was used as a base for police hit squads. He had to admit that he had known of the existence of Vlakplaas but he thought it was simply a place where ANC activists were ‘turned round’. The assassins of Vlakplaas were unruly elements who wanted to keep their activities secret from him.5
The chutzpah of primitive pride in action can often leave onlookers flabbergasted. They are unable to point out to the exponent of such pride that every idea we hold, every meaning that we create, has bad implications as well as good. De Klerk might claim ignorance of what was going on in the country of which he was President, but this has the bad implication that he was not doing his job properly. People were acting in his name, and so he was responsible for the matters of which he claimed ignorance.
However, many people feel that it is better to be charged with incompetence than to be charged with wickedness. By saying, ‘I’m just a poor, fallible human being trying to do my best,’ we can show humility and contrition while taking pride in our humility and contrition. We are all extremely skilled at reinterpreting events in order to hold our meaning structure together.
One area where we frequently redefine is that of responsibility. Like de Klerk, we can deny responsibility for events for which we were clearly responsible, or we can claim responsibility for events over which in fact we had no control. Such a redefinition, the writer and biologist Barbara Ehrenreich surmises, could be at the beginning of our concepts of sacrifice and religion.
When, some 100,000 years ago, our species first emerged it was into a world dominated by large animals. We were small creatures, much smaller than we are today, and we were prey to the beasts. It took us many thousands of years to develop tools to defend ourselves. Artificial fire-making and action-at-a-distance weapons like the bow and arrow were not invented until some 15,000 years ago.
Only then did we turn ourselves from prey to predator. However, the fear of being prey is still very much with us. Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out that grief, depression and helplessness are the experiences of those who are prey. It seems from the research on phobias that people much