Writing a recent blog, I found myself reflecting how we sometimes make decisions and take actions based on firm convictions that exist inside us. On other occasions we find ourselves thinking and behaving in ways that more reflect the values and attitudes of the people around us.  We could categorise these two modes as, respectively, individual and tribal behaviour.  At my boarding school in my teens, we were all required to join the Combined Cadet Force (CCF).  Most of us accepted this as part of the price of living in a post-war world where there was a vague possibility of a foreign army invading Britain.  Only one boy argued his way out of this obligation on the grounds of a convinced pacifism.  I was impressed with the fact that he argued his case in front of the headmaster and successfully convinced him of his personal convictions.  The idea of having a conviction which went right against the assumption of the crowd was then something new to me.  It was and is so much easier to go along with whatever everyone else is thinking or doing.  The voice of the crowd, or the tribe, is a powerful force and few of us will resist it unless there are exceptional circumstances.  The crowd mind is also a place of apparent strength.   To embrace it in religion or politics is also to feel safe and protected from the isolation and the sense of weakness that can come as the result of going it alone.

The ability to preserve a unique personality and individuality in the face of the tribal forces around is a huge challenge, especially for the young.  We are constantly being pulled in several directions simultaneously.  A lot of the energy we feel is coming from the groups around us, urging us to fit in.  In addition, another part of us is fully aware that we are unique.  We do have our own convictions as well as a functioning conscience.  Thus, we have an individual contribution to make either to the family or to the wider society.  Nevertheless, the constant pull towards conformity and practising other forms of group behaviour persists.  It is a balancing act and probably few of us get it right much of the time. Perhaps the most important task is for us to recognise that there is a struggle to be had in working out who we are individually and the temptation to go along with the easier option of tribal behaviour. Having some awareness of this struggle will perhaps prevent us ever going too far down the path of mindless conformity.  The place of balance is one which is worth searching for even if we do not always find it.

We often, in talking about balance between extremes, refer to the idea of a continuum.  This word evokes the picture of a measuring rod with people choosing which place to occupy along its length.  Some will cluster at one end, others in the middle, while others will find themselves at the far end.  Two examples of continuums will be familiar to all my readers.  The first is to be found in politics, where the language of left, right and centre is firmly embedded into our discourse.  We are also aware of the way that a quasi-political language exists to describe church practices.  We speak about extremes of conservative evangelical belief or high church practice as though people occupy a place somewhere on this scale.  Most politically active adults find themselves remaining fairly securely identified at one point on the political continuum and this may not change over a lifetime.  Others consciously move up or down this scale, reflecting changing convictions or different life experiences.  In a church context we might say of an individual who moves from a conservative stance to an open evangelical position that he/she has moved towards the centre.

Returning to the contrast we began with, the distinction between tribal and individual conscience-driven behaviour, I have come to see that both ways of functioning exist along continuums.  It is never a case that one sort of behaviour is right and the other wrong, it is always a question of balance.  To take the, person who acts out of his/her conviction or sense of independence, there is the distinct possibility that their individuality has been taken to an extreme.  We have a word to describe the extreme of individuality, and the word is narcissism.  When somebody acts out a personalised agenda with absolutely no sense of what others are thinking, that is not likely to result in acceptable behaviour.  The descriptions of narcissism, which include the ideas of entitlement, grandiosity and failure of empathy, all point to a crass insensitive individuality which is not acceptable.  In other words, the fact that an individual is not looking to the tribe for cues on how to behave does not make them an example of heroic and commendable independence.   Their behaviour can be harmful and destructive to others. 

If narcissistic individuality is at one end an extreme of poor behaviour, we can imagine that we might find at the other end an isolated sad individual who has withdrawn into a place of complete non-engagement with others.   This place of non-engagement is not to be judged on moral grounds, as the cause of such a stance may have much more to do with upbringing and poor nurture.   We mention it because, describing in brief these two ends of the individual continuum, we can be more aware of a central balanced point which is the optimum place to be.  I leave it to my readers to imagine what the ‘mean between extremes’, as Aristotle might have put it, looks like.  If we know we have to avoid the crass exploitative manipulations of the narcissist and the sad place occupied by the isolated individual, most of us will have some sense what the optimum place of individual functioning will look like.

The second continuum, where we need to find a place of balance, is the one where we recognise that our human functioning requires us to fit in with the tribe or crowd.  We recognise how this external force is exerting pressure on us.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  What is bad potentially is when we cannot ever see that this force is working on us.   At that moment we are a part of a tribe.  We need, for example, to have some understanding that the socialist ideas that we expound are linked to the social circles we move in.  To claim that our political convictions are uniquely worked out by our intellect and individual conscience is probably dishonest.  This is not wicked in any way, but it marks a failure of insight which may make us less empathetic to the position of others.  It would be unrealistic to suggest that what other people think or say has no bearing on our actions and thoughts.  Again, it is a question of balance.  The continuum for this crowd behaviour will have, as one extreme, the place where the individual is completely dominated by the group – the ‘we think’ brigade.  Nothing original is permitted inside our heads and every stance we take has to be in accordance with what the leader or group have decreed.  We see this type of behaviour in cults but also, sadly, in churches.  Some churches are quite good at destroying the individuality of their members to create a uniformity which is destructive of a balanced humanity.  I am not clear what the opposite extreme of this continuum looks like, but it might belong to the person who believes that they can live without community but in a proud self-sufficiency.  However we describe the two ends of the community/tribal spectrum, we know that there is a place of balance in the continuum where such things as mutuality, love and interdependence can flourish.  We need other people and other people need us.   Getting that particular balance right takes skill and experiment.  To use another word that has cropped up recently in these blogs, we need to be oscillating along the spectrum to find the right place to allow both our individual thinking and our social existence to flourish.

This reflection has attempted to explore something of the dilemmas of being human.  The word that we keep coming back to is the word balance.  Being human and Christian, we need to find a balance in our lives.  We need to avoid the extremes of self-inflation/narcissism and over exposure to the dehumanising of crowd/tribal behaviour.  Those who lead us will accomplish their responsibilities so much better if they are aware of these dynamics which seek to trap us in human conceit and self-inflation or, alternatively, destructive self-deprecation. 

My thoughts on balance within our lives, finding altruistic love for others rather than selfish exploitative behaviour, are naturally inspired by Christian ideals.  Fitting together these ideas about the place of balance and seeing how they are exemplified in the teaching of Jesus is still a work in progress.  Meanwhile I sense that we can see Jesus as one who well understood the competing pressures of individuality and belonging to groups. Sometimes that tension which he faced led to family fallings-out.  What was going on in Jesus’ mind when he uttered those memorable words in front of his mother and family?  ‘Who is my mother and who are my brothers?’ This same Jesus showed an acute sense of family when he uttered the words from the cross ‘Behold thy mother’ to the beloved disciple.  Jesus lived the same tension of living out a unique vocation with balancing a human need to belong.  All of us have in different ways to resolve this tension of individuality and belonging.  It is something that comes with fact of being human.  Awareness of the problem is a first step in finding a way forward that does justice to our well-being and flourishing as Christian men and women,