Vilmos Csányi

Single-Person Groups and Globalisation

 

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The human behavioural complex

In order to uncover the biological roots of human nature, it is worth tracing the most significant events in the evolution of human behaviour, starting from the point in time where we branched off from our nearest kindred, the chimpanzee, right up to the beginnings of the emergence of modern human civilisation and culture; in other words, we go back roughly forty to fifty thousand years (Csányi 1979, 1980, 1989a, 1992a, 1992b).
In the course of that evolutionary process, man acquired new, genetically determined, species-specific behavioural features, exclusive to himself, that fundamentally determine his social behaviour.
Our nearest relatives in the animal world are the chimpanzees and bonobos. The genetic material of man and chimpanzees differs by no more than one per cent. The ancestor that we share with chimpanzees and orang-utans, and the descendants of that ancestor on separating from those two species were socially highly developed animals. They lived in loose groups which occupied large territories and took care of their young for a long time. The loose group structure, also characteristic of chimpanzees, in essence entails that every individual seeks its own nourishment independently, but there is strong competition for the sources of food; as a result, individuals are relatively aggressive, though they are also capable of smaller-scale joint action when it comes to holding territory, hunting for prey, or, in some cases, to warding off predators; on such occasions they tolerate one another's proximity. Joint activities comprise only a small fraction of the individuals' day-to-day activities. They sleep alone and strive to eat alone, the sole exception to this being the years-long, continuous bond between a mother and her young offspring, in which the mother shares both her food and sleeping place with her offspring.
Sexuality has a subordinate role in chimpanzee group-life, whereas in that of bonobos, however, it serves multiple functions, as in human life. Sexual intercourse is frequent outside the fertile phase of the oestrous cycle, having the function of reducing aggression and alleviating stress.
To a list of behavioural forms we may add the occasional use of primitive tools (sticks and stones), and a system of communication, typical of animals, which is capable of transmitting 20-25 predetermined, genetically fixed messages. Communication serves to regulate aggression, status, play, coupling, and the mother-infant bond, as well as helping in detecting external threats and organising communal defence.
On inspecting the biological attributes of modern man, living in group cultures that can now be considered to be societies, what we find, besides the obvious overlaps, is that there are also conspicuous differences. In human group cultures the group structure is very tight-knit; groups are closed and generally have permanent or semi-settled places of abode. Both the individual and the group are characterised by an unusual constructive activity that is present only exceptionally in other animal species, with that construction extending to material, social and abstract structures. Members of a group work continuously in common to a high degree in acquiring resources and in the course of constructive activities. Aggression within the group is minimal; relations between different groups can range from cooperation to total aggression.
Primitive animal communication gave way to human language; technologically complicated forms of using and making tools came into being; abstract thinking emerged. Sexuality intensified, the time and energy devoted to rearing offspring increased further, the role of early socialisation expanded significantly. Perhaps most conspicuously of all, groups became increasingly individualised; constructive activity, language, belief systems, religions, and customs became integrated into cultures and marked every group as unique. Group individualisation was a definitive process from the evolutionary viewpoint too, because of individual selection being replaced by the initiation of a biological mechanism of group selection (Alexander and Borgia, 1976), enabling a much faster rate of development, which we may term cultural evolution (Csányi, 1989a).
The biological bases of human behavioural attributes were manifested in a co-evolutionary process in which there was an on-going interaction between the developing culture and the currently available, but variable, biological bases- genes. In other words, after the appearance of the very simplest culture, the selective pressure of the cultural milieu modified subsequent genetic variations. As attributes that were conducive to cultural modification appeared, even if only in prototypical form, the moment that they created some form of cultural structure, and the milieu to which that genetic variation had been scaled immediately changed (Donald, 1991). Fitness for a culture ever more effectively transforms the original biological environment, thereby fundamentally determining the direction of selection.
Within a process that has been going on for several million years, the interaction of genes and culture is readily discernible if we examine more closely the species-specific groups of biological attributes that have arisen in the case of man. The complex of human-specific attributes has developed around group life. Amongst animals that live in groups, the size of a group is fundamentally determined by the structure of the resources that are to be found in its surroundings. In the course of human evolution, the size of the group has conspicuously grown fairly independently of the local resources. In the initial stage of cultural evolution, at the time group societies first arose, the group size has been put at around one hundred to one hundred and fifty people (Dunbar, 1996).
Obviously, a close-knit group structure can only arise if aggression within the group is suppressed and minimised, since a high level of aggression disperses the group. Man's ancestors had to tolerate one another's physical proximity, had to overcome all the sources of conflict which, amongst related species, would lead to a high level of aggression. The reduction of intra-group aggression, however, was associated with a rise in inter-group aggression, the development of xenophobia. The second condition for the emergence of a close-knit group structure was a reduction in sexual rivalry, if that were to remain at a high level, constant conflicts would again tear the group apart and would also preclude a division of labour, such as the temporary absence of smaller subgroups of males on hunting trips. Amongst our anthropoid relatives, that problem was solved by the suppression of polygamy and by the development of monogamy and pair bonding, made possible by a change in the function of sexuality. Human sexuality assumed a stress-relieving and pleasure-inducing function over and beyond the production of offspring. With man that pleasure-producing function, on the evidence of sexual psychology, was also accompanied by the emergence of pair bonding. Human sexuality strengthens the pair bond, creating the more or less enduring monogamous relationships that made it possible for sexual competition to be minimised.
The systems of institutionalised pair bonding in different cultures conform to that biological basis. We find institutionalised monogamy in about forty per cent of cultures, but even in cultures practising institutionalised polygamy most men are monogamous, with only those at the very top of the status hierarchy actually practising polygamy (Murdoch, 1967). Furthermore, in both monogamous and polygamous societies we find deviances in the opposite direction: in the form of mistresses and prostitution in monogamous societies, and in the institution of the favourite and main wife in polygamous societies. Using a one hundred-point scale, where zero would correspond to pure monogamy and 100 to pure polygamy, on the basis of morphological features man lies at a value somewhere between 10 and 15. In other words, the monogamous tendency is strong but not complete, and it is likely that individual genetic variability plays a part in its degree of manifestation.
Man has yet another completely new attribute: loyalty to the group. Relations between animals in any group are determined by the links bonding them to single individuals. According to our present knowledge, the animal brain is in-capable of conceiving of the group as an entity, divorced from its specific members. That, however, is precisely what the abstractive abilities of the human brain make possible. For man, the group exists as an autonomous, abstract reality, a social construct that is apparently independent of him (Berger and Luckman, 1967). The new attribute of human motivational systems is the unconditional loyalty which arises in the perfectly socialised members of a group. It often happens that a person will offer significant assistance to members of his group, to his own disadvantage if necessary, even sacrificing his life for the sake of his group: these are features that are unknown in the animal world. Amongst animals, parents may help their offspring, and males may be prepared to defend their females, but to do so lies in their readily predictable individual genetic interest and it is, in any case, tightly constrained. With man, the group interest, unconditional loyalty towards the abstract group entity, makes an appearance alongside the genetic interest, and that becomes a defining factor of our behavioural biology.
Another group of new attributes comprises such apparently disparate features as the use of language and artefacts, and abstract thinking. These can be traced back, however, to a kind of open-ended constructive ability which existed in the animal world, prior to man, only in a prototypical form. Animal communication is not a system for transmitting ideas but a physiological regulatory mechanism which serves to coordinate internal states. The 15 to 25 different, genetically precisely predetermined messages of animal communication can be regarded as components of what, from the viewpoint of information transmission, is a closed system (Csányi, 1994).
The function of human language is entirely different. It is a medium not just for swapping messages relating to emotional states but also for exchanging conceptual representations, through which the present, past and future, intentions, plans, ideas and alternatives can be expressed in an open-ended system that can transmit a theoretically infinite number of different messages. It permits phenomena, artefacts, actions and agents that occur in the environs (with the user group of the language as the implied environ), on gaining linguistic representation, to appear in new structures and new combinations as reconstructions of reality.
An abstract, virtual reality is thereby brought into existence in which the attributes of entities-whether those entities be representations of objects or persons, real or imagined-are bestowed by the users of the language. The behaviour of the linguistic artefacts is a function of the creativity of the users of the language. By dint of the fact that imagined objects may assume any form and behaviour, virtual reality can expand the sphere of activity of speakers; but it also acts as a kind of restriction, because objects can only assume the characteristics that we bestow on them. The human brain is able to conceive of ideal systems, can imagine a point, a straight line, a circle, a plane, or the extremes of good and evil. The discovery of mathematics becomes possible and, equally, there can be summoned up a spirit world peopled by demons, fairies, benevolent or wrathful gods.
The production of instruments, above all the making and use of tools, was for a long time regarded as the sole and clinching proof of man's superiority. We have since learned that many animals also make use of objects, tools; some, indeed, even produce those tools for their own use. A survey a few years ago showed 80 animal species possessing those skills (Mundinger, 1980). The use of tools by animals is a special case, however, with only odd species making use of an implement for a fixed, specific goal. That ability is genetically endowed; it is only marginally improved by learning. In man's case, the making and use of artefacts is isomorphous with linguistic competence and abstract thinking. It too is a kind of open-ended reconstructive ability with the help of which we give objects new, imagined forms and attributes, adjust their function to logical systems of rules, and thereby create machines and technologies.
The basis of the above two clusters of attributes is the activity of the human group, which is unprecedented and totally dissimilar to that of animal groups. The determining biological attribute of man is the above-outlined constructive ability, although it is not manifested as an individual attribute but, generally speaking, as a group activity. Group activity and cooperation of a kind may also be observed amongst socially developed animals (such as hunting in packs by chimpanzees or canine species), but all those forms of animal cooperation lack the element of constructive ability.
Human cooperation, by contrast, is an interaction of a complementary nature that rests on learning processes: the communal task is broken down into smaller parts, and roles, plans, and variants are anticipated even before the activity is embarked upon. Members of the group divide the partial activities up amongst themselves, so their cooperation is complementary in character and serves some kind of predetermined common goal. The cooperation of human groups is characterised by the prior construction of an "individual plan of action", leading to the individualisation of groups and the emergence of the mechanism of group selection. The individual plan of action is a linguistic construct; its elements are learned, and so in that respect too it differs from the "genetic action plans" that serve as the basis for animal cooperation. It is also typical that man is inclined to place such action plans and, later on, more complex ideas into a within-group ranking order, and to subordinate himself to the dominant action plan, in the same way as he does to a dominant fellow member of the group.
Indubitably, constructive ability, a tight-knit group structure and group loyalty, language, and the abstractive ability bestow on individual action plans an infinite richness, making possible the extremely rapid climb in cultural evolution. To these abilities were associated a string of mechanisms which are likewise manifested as biological attributes only in man and serve to synchronise the activities of group members. It would have been useless for a high level of constructive ability to be manifested in individuals had synchronising mechanisms not emerged, as the group would have been incapable of concerted activity. We know of many specialised physiological mechanisms that assist synchronisation.
The human ability ready to accept a system of rules-communal norms, for example-likewise leads to a synchronisation of the behaviour of group members. There are also countless modes of emotional synchronisation; people capable of, and receptive to, rhythm, music, song or dance take part in a kind of synchronisation of mind and behaviour in the course of those activities.
Finally, a few particular consequences of the interaction of the aforementioned clusters of attributes have to be underlined. A tight-knit group structure, constructive activity, and synchronising ability constitute a sort of closed feedback loop. A good part of the constructive activity of an isolated group is directed at the group itself, which is strengthened by synchronisation and preserved by group loyalty and its attendant phenomena; that is to say, the group constructs itself. This has several consequences. One is the emergence of surface structures of the various systems of rules, norms and language. In the same way as children learning a language are capable of abstracting from the linguistic environment the system of rules that is valid for that particular linguistic environment (of which the grammar described by linguists is merely a scientific model), so too is the individual able to recognise some kind of system of rules in the interaction between members of his group and-thanks to his other attributes- obey, and thereby confirm, them. Language, kinship systems, rituals, even daily routines are manifested in a similar manner and become fixed in cultures, thereby contributing to the previously mentioned group individuality.
One very important biological attribute of man is his capacity for socialisation, that biological and cultural process during which, through the largely irreversible processes of individual development, the members of a group learn the language and customs of their group. Their biologically based bonds to the members of the group, and to its cultural ideals, are formed, along with an unconditional loyalty to the group. If the individual is born into an optimally sized isolated group-as was generally the case for a good portion of human evolution-socialisation will be perfect. In matters of group-level cultural ideals -loyalty, communal actions-contrary opinions cannot arise since every one (parents, relatives, all adult members of the group) is a vehicle of the selfsame views and customs. This socialising process fixes the structure of the group and higher-level structures; the group is able to change only over generations, in rather small steps, as the process of socialisation precludes major changes.
Human and animal groups are differentiated by a distinctive duality. The human group appears as an autonomous unit, with its own plans, goals, identity, and way of thinking, and it comes into being through the internal differentiation of those attributes, that is to say, through the individual roles, functions, cooperative actions, and independent, personal way of thinking of the group members. The animal mind is isolated; it may be able to reflect on its individual experiences, but all its knowledge derives exclusively from its own activity. The members of human cultures, through language, artefacts and customs, are in continuous contact with their group's higher-level actions and processes of thinking. As a result, they are able to make use of the experience of others going back many generations, but each one individually can also process every thought and action of the group in his own brain. That processing, the result of individual thinking, can act back on the group mind through communication. That organisation, incidentally, is strikingly similar to the system of links between brain and neurones.
Examining the new biological attributes from the viewpoint of the human individual, the relation between individual and group, we can conclude that essentially four decisive changes occurred:
The first is that common beliefs arise in human groups. A person accepts uncritically the culture that expresses his identity; he believes in the group's cultural ideals, myths, religion and ideology.
The second change is that man becomes capable of taking part in joint actions, in higher-level complementary cooperation with those belonging to the group and within a framework determined by the cultural ideals.
The third change is an integral complement of the first two: the cultural ideals and culturally guided actions continuously bring into being common constructions in the conceptual, social and material realms.
Finally, the fourth change is that man develops a tight emotional bonding to his group and, unlike in the case of animals, the interests of the group incline man to altruistic behaviour that may be diametrically opposed to his individual and genetic interests, even going as far as self-sacrifice.
The above four attributes amount, in essence, to an extraordinary innate human capacity for systems organisation. From the viewpoint of behavioural biology, that systems-organisational capability is man's basic species-specific attribute. Each human culture is a complex system of people, artefacts, behavioural forms and ideals. It is precisely the systems-organisational capability that coordinates those components and integrates them into a human culture. Artificial cultural systems, in which one or other of the four organisational attributes cannot be freely manifested, are dysfunctional.
Up to this point, we have been examining the mechanisms that operate within groups, but it is likely that already during an early period of cultural evolution there appeared a regulatory system, likewise having a biological basis but one in which what is yet unknown is the relative extent to which culture and biological determinants intercede with the emergence of mechanisms for groups to reach compromises amongst one another.
Group loyalty went hand-in-hand with the emergence of hatred of other groups, or xenophobia (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, 1992). Isolation of groups and antagonism between groups were essential components in the evolution of the early groups. As a result of evolutionary success, suitable vacant territories increasingly shrank; the fitter groups, on expanding beyond their optimum size, would keep splitting as before, but those who separated would remain increasingly in proximity with one another. In that situation, each group would increasingly be surrounded by other groups that, though differing from it and living their own lives, nonetheless had a language and customs that were comprehensible, a culture that could not be dismissed out of hand, and resources had to be shared with those groups. General warfare or migration were no longer options, there being nowhere to move to. Mechanisms for compromise appeared to help the groups divide resources amongst themselves. On examining these mechanisms, we find many rational elements and also tensions, but they lack, or are weak in, elements of cooperation, unconditional loyalty, self-sacrifice, and moral support based on common beliefs. In agreements between groups two autonomous systems enter into interaction at the group level. For the individual, belonging to one or the other group, that interaction is manifested in an entirely different way from the link with his own group. Instead of common action, compromise becomes a useful mechanism; instead of a common cultural belief system, differentiation and cautious rejection; instead of loyalty, minor cheating, cunning and deception.
The mechanisms of inter-group compromise brought a further reduction of aggression, but they hindered the assertion of mechanisms for biological regulation of human populations and opened the way to the emergence of the modern megapopulation in which we live.
One consequence of the rapid growth of population is the ending of the isolation of group societies. Groups of different languages and cultures can no longer steer clear of one another, on the basis of various agreements, but must live alongside one another even when, on occasion, they may be at war with one another rather than in agreement. Agreements soon led to the creation of tribes and tribal alliances and, in more recent times, states in which the members of the earlier group cultures frequently live comingled. They learn one another's languages, observe one another's customs, families mix. That represents a huge challenge for a group society. As long as the group was isolated, members of the group, having undergone perfect socialisation, had no dilemmas over choices or decisions. Everything that might be thought or spoken about was given in the group culture. The group knew everything: the possible courses of practical action, all variants of every imaginable world; it had a sure answer for everything, because the minds making up the group's culture had become adjusted to one another through a process of evolution over many generations. The ideas of the various groups belonged to one possible (i.e. practically sound) cluster or organisation of ideas. The great mingling of cultures not only mixed people but ideas as well-ways of doing what had to be done, major taboos, foods that could and could not be eaten, customs, fairies and demons, gods. A lot of good came out of that mixing, with the emergence of new combinations and, an incredible acceleration in the evolution of ideas. But a previously unknown challenge was also lying in wait for individuals, the members of the group: Which idea was good, which was bad? What was the best way of sowing and reaping? Which is the most appropriate procedure for burying the dead? What gods exist, and how should they be appeased? Good and evil appeared on the scene. The individual had to decide; this was in reality the historical period of the biblical Fall, and evolution had not prepared man for that.
If human socialisation is perfect, it constructs a harmonious personality, when the child is surrounded by a balanced world in which there are no doubts. That was the case in group societies. People living within the protective ark of group culture had no need to ponder on the distinction between good and evil, were not obliged to make individual decisions, and did not have individual responsibilities. The absence of pressures to decide applied not just to ideas but to affiliation to the group itself. A perfectly socialised person does not wish to leave his own group and is unable to integrate into another. The imperfectly socialised individual, on the other hand, is constantly seeking his own true group. Cohesion to the group and recognition of one's own group are two separate processes. There was a time when recognising the group played little part in a person's life. A member of a group society who lost his group simply perished; there was no possibility of any choice. The biological bonds that tie us to the group are so strong that we have to satisfy those under all circumstances. We need to have a bond to some kind of group, real or imagined, even if it is a pseudo-group that has been projected into the imagination by social manipulation.
With the mingling of cultures our capacity for adhering to rules also underwent a transformation. In natural group cultures there was no need even to formulate rules because these were imbued into everyone through social learning in the course of socialisation. The capacity of the developing child to recognise and adhere to rules, however, is no longer adequate to allow the functioning of nations, religions and states organised on the basis of ideas. That has prompted the birth of explicit, written laws, legal codes and the organisational ideas that, moving into the place of natural rules, are capable of coordinating the activities of even millions of people (Csányi, 1989b).
It is a consequence of the operation of rule- and group-organising ideas that the social, functional and spiritual unity of group societies has broken down. As a result of complex differentiation, we now have separate religious groups for our spiritual activities, various groups such as schools, universities and parties for social activities, yet other groups in which we carry out our daily work, and still others in which we live our daily lives. We are tied to some of these by genuine group-cohesion mechanisms, to others by organisational ideas. The efficacy and organising power of the two types of bond are quite different.

The single-person group

... The autonomous personality is the ultimate reduction of the group, the single-person group, which organises its actions and constructions for itself, chooses its beliefs for itself, is loyal only to itself but is ready to reach compromises with others. In modern society, therefore, the role of biological bonding is continuously diminishing (or alienation is growing, as sociologists would say, looking at it from from another angle); the structure of society is becoming increasingly describable in terms of the negotiated structures of single-person groups, that is autonomous individuals.
In the eyes of those unfamiliar with psychology and biology that may not seem as terrible as it actually is. Yet what is at issue is that modern society robs man of the manifestations of a fundamental aspect of his humanity, the normal development of cohesion within the group, and the consequences of that are the most diverse mental disturbances and neuroses.
Man's group-organisational attributes are biological in nature and, just like basic physiological needs, they continually seek to be satisfied. That is why innumerable groups of the most diverse kinds are formed in modern society. Since socialisation does not occur in a natural fashion, cohesion to these is rather weak, as is shown by the continual break-up of groups. Modern man attempts to counteract that weak cohesion by being a member of many groups simultaneously, seeking, by splitting these over space and time, to satisfy his need for groups in many different ways.
Technology also offers countless pseudo-solutions to satisfy the biological needs due to individualism in a megapopulation. One function of the mass media is to continuously present pseudo-groups to satisfy our biological need to be members of a recognised group. The casts of popular soaps, such as Dallas or Friends, are pseudo-groups of this kind, but so too is the collection of A-list international figures and celebrities who feature in news programmes. Man has always been mightily interested in the decision process of his group, he too having once been an active participant. The various pseudo-groups of presidents and political leaders hold out an invitation that we too are there amongst the decision-makers. At the same time this also gives the appearance that problems are in safe hands because the shop-window decision-makers come to solutions on the basis of some sort of scientific, predictive model. What becomes clear time and time again in daily events is that the decision-makers do not see events in society even so much as a few days ahead. They have no predictive models, the future is completely unfathomable, and yet analysis of environmental, energy resource and other problems shows that there is a need for political decisions that look many decades into the future. The media servicing of our need for pseudo-groups compounds the problem by obscuring it.

Globalisation based on single-person groups?

... For a long time cultural evolution took place within group societies and slowly. Slowly enough to enable the developing cultures, in a process of co-evolution, to alter man's behavioural-genetic endowments, to shape the specific human factors of fitness for the culture, to finally wrest man from the animal world. These changes made system-organisational attributes an inherited part of human nature. It is a biological endowment of our species that it is drawn to common actions and common constructions; that it makes these the basis of common belief systems; and moreover that, within his recognised groups, he is capable of relegating his own interests to the real or supposed interests of the new system that is being evolved with the group as a new, higher-level entity. The success of human evolution has brought into being a megasociety that extends across the whole world in which man's systems-organisational attributes, in line with their basic nature, are manifested with unaltered activity, but in place of the natural, humanly scaled groups of several hundred people that would also be controllable by biological regulatory factors, there have appeared the supergroups of rational systems-organisation, comprising tens and hundreds of millions of people, in the form of armies, nations, states, world religions and multinational firms. Man is not bonded to these groups, in accordance with his natural endowments, by every fibre of his systems-organisational capabilities but, for the most part, merely through one or two functions. Big armies and bureaucracies, for example, are organised through the attributes of obedience to rules and hierarchies; political parties, being based solely on distribution of power, do not constitute true groups with showy virtual actions now being the only things held in common. The family has become detached from the domain of common action, from work; the common constructions have become services; and finally, the function of sacrificing individual interests has been emptied because the reaction of people living in a megasociety to the loss of their natural social environment has been the rise of the one-person group. In group societies individual competition was reduced to a minimum; instead the groups competed with one another. That system gave humans an indispensable emotional stability and the group's unconditional protection, but the sources of creativity were also retained through competition between groups (Carneiro, 1967).
One-person human groups living in megasocieties are in continual competition with one another, and that is the source of the astounding creativity of megasocieties. The price of that is a seemingly definitive loss of emotional stability, the appearance of personal values instead of a common scale of values. That may have a particularly serious impact on the stability of the system. Group societies were able to regulate the size of the community, that being what the interest of the group demanded. In the case of single-person groups the suprapersonal group interest does not function; reproduction is left to the control of individuals. As a result, humanity, for all its technological and scientific advances, is unable to halt population explosion, and it will remain incapable of doing so until it is able once again to match reproduction to the interests of the higher-level group. From the viewpoint of population dynamics, man is a prisoner of his biological endowments, and his cultural instruments currently appear inadequate for a solution.
Group societies were in equilibrium with their environment, if only because they exploited the environment to only a negligible extent. The beliefs and cultural ideals of those societies did not imperil the biosphere's very existence. Megasocieties have devastated a primeval biosphere that was independent of them; what we now take to be natural is in reality agriculturally managed forest, savannah or meadow and, from the evolutionary standpoint, so young that we can have no idea of its chances of survival. Man has eradicated nature from the ground beneath his own feet and now, together with a few selected animal and plant species and the remnants of a dying biosphere, he is hovering in what may be considered to be an ecological void. Or perhaps plunging at an ever-accelerating pace, for how would we know?
By dint of their smallness, group societies had no appreciable impact on the physical parameters of our planet and had the benefit of a climatic equilibrium that had developed over many millions of years. The energy consumption and output of pollutants of megasocieties have altered the Earth's surface temperature, atmospheric composition and the amount of incident energy that it absorbs at an astonishing pace and thereby set off unpredictable changes.
Notwithstanding the uncertainties, two possible paths for the process of globalisation suggest themselves from considerations of what we have learned about the biological organisational level.
One is that some way will be found of successfully hitching globalisation to the process of socialisation: of developing ideologies whose central values will include a small populational size, cherishing the biosphere, and the immorality of polluting the environment and excessive energy consumption. If everyone, or at least a majority, were to accept these during the period of socialisation, then even single-person societies, as building blocks, might give rise to a global culture. There already seem to be encouraging signs of this; human rights and environmental protection could be global ideals that might serve as the first pillars of a global culture.
The second path might be for the processes of individualisation to be a route by which a more vigorous group-organisational ideal were to gain the upper hand without-dissimilarities apart-provoking the antagonism of the new groups. These processes might be the seeds of open, territorially delimited, but not territorially expansive, regional organisations or concepts of receptive cultural nations. Coalitions and compromises of the new-type, higher-level organisations might then lay down the foundations for a comprehensive, global culture.

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