FOR this year’s BBC Free Thinking Festival: “The One and the Many”, the prevailing theme was crowd psychology. Programmes that were normally recorded in hermetically sealed studios were, for the duration, set on stage in front of indulgent audiences: they applauded at the correct times, and laughed at the lightest quip.
But perhaps we should not be so afraid of the crowd as we are. The social psychologist Professor Steve Reicher — the subject of The Life Scientific (Radio 4, Tuesday of last week) and a contributor to Crowd Science (World Service, Friday) — says that crowds can be good for you.
He has studied one of the largest crowds on the planet — the millions who gather for the Hindu Magh Mela — and, despite the proximity to so many other people, the pilgrims report a greater sense of mental well-being and physical health. Crowd psychology is really about our psychology: it is called a mob if it is doing something of which you disapprove, and an audience if it is something culturally acceptable.
The discussion on Crowd Science between Professor Reicher, the sociologist, on the one hand, and the neuroscientist Professor Malinda Carpenter, on the other, offered an intriguing case-study in the tensions between two different intellectual approaches. Professor Carpenter and her developmental-psychologist chums are all about devising experiments that demonstrate how we are neurologically attuned to be social animals. Test a group of nursery-school children, and they will show you how dependent we are on the group.
Professor Reicher warns us, however, that the very premise of such experiments is charged with negative connotations: the assumption is that this aversion to being ostracised is necessarily the result of dependency. And, of course, there are innumerable examples where the crowd is a dangerous phenomenon.
But look at it a different way: the crowd empowers the weak and effects social change. Our desire to belong to the group is a statement of faith in others and their collective ability to work for the good. If you are looking for a way to defend the concept of the Church, then Professor Reicher’s perspective might provide some reassurance.
In In Our Time (Radio 4, Thursday of last week), the subject was St Augustine’s Confessions, and, if nothing else, the programme provided an excellent Bluffer’s Guide to a text that we all feel we ought to have studied. But, when it came to Augustine and the innate sinfulness of creation, we were treated to a Manichaean rupture among the learned guests.
Professor Martin Palmer gave us the traditional view, that Augustine regarded the world as irredeemably bad; and Professor Kate Cooper offered a more generous reading: it is humanity’s pride that divides us from an otherwise benign creation.
It is a nicety that might matter only to those who listen to In Our Time — but that is what makes this strand so special.
