Social Conscience – Part 1
“Social Conscience ”
I love July, in fact I love winter. Unfortunately, I am the only one in my family. The rest of them, sons and wife, hate it. They constantly complain of all the things they cannot do because of the cold, how it looks in winter, how they battle to get warm on and on they go. Another issue is the difference between my thermostat and theirs. As I don’t really seem to get cold, I tend to leave a window or two open (just a bit) and often turn the heaters’ temperature down. This then result in a sort of musical chairs game where I constantly try to get some fresh air into the house, without them noticing, and them constantly trying to find and close these open windows without me noticing. On and on it goes.
While on holiday in the Drakensberg during the June/July school holidays, the weather suddenly took a turn for the worst. Dark clouds came rolling in driven by an ice cold and angry wind. We made a nice fire and debated if we may be snowed in. While making hot chocolate for all of us I innocently opened the backdoor of the chalet to have a quick look at the progress of the weather. Well! Like a pack of hungry wolves my loving family howled at me. “Close that &*%$ door…” (the wife), “Jisim dad you are soooo selfish! You only think of yourself, fresh air fresh air…” (the eldest), “Dad, the hot chocolate will get cold…” (the youngest). The middle one just looked at me with his huge eyes. After a while he asked, “Do you think the horses in the mountain will be ok?”
Four varying responses to one person’s actions. An instruction, an accusation, a complaint and … empathy? Or could it also be an example of social consciousness?
The concept “Social Consciousness”, in my opinion, is somewhat obscure. It seems as if many people talk about it, have opinions about it but few seem to be able to really define it. It also seems to be quite emotionally laden and often used/abused by politicians, clergy, environmentalists and many others.
Charles Cooley (1907) wrote about this in his paper “Social Consciousness”. According to him social consciousness, or awareness of society, is inseparable from self-consciousness, because we can hardly think of ourselves excepting with reference to a social group of some sort, nor of the group except with reference to ourselves. The two things go together, and what we are really aware of is a more or less complex personal or social whole, of which now the particular, now the general aspect is emphasized.
In general, then, most of our reflective consciousness – our wide-awake state of mind – is social consciousness, because a sense of our relation to other persons, or of other persons to one another, can hardly fail to be a part of it. Self and society are twin-born, and we know one as immediately as we know the other.
This simply means that through these interactions, we develop an idea of who we are. He referred to this as the “Looking Glass Self”. In other words, when we feel shame or pride, it is due to what we think others view us as. However, we do not always perceive someone’s impressions correctly. For example, if you walk into the boardroom, just before the start of a meeting where you will be raising some sensitive issues, and a few of your colleagues laugh and suddenly get quiet. You may interpret their behaviour as ridicule and may start, to interpret their future behaviours as negative/disrespectful etc. The result may be either questioning your own abilities, decline of your self-confidence and so forth.
The notion of the looking-glass self applies throughout our lives: interactions with new people time and again encourage self-evaluation based on a presumed impression given off. So, my self-identity is too a large extent socially constructed.
These complex dynamics of social identity unfold through five nested levels of social consciousness. These, in turn, relate to transformations in worldview.
1. Level One of social consciousness is referred to as embedded or the “blind” level.
Here, consciousness is shaped without our awareness by social, cultural and biological factors. It’s a kind of pre-social consciousness that serves as a baseline for our own development. We are not really aware of the complex interactions and we are also not really thinking about these. We simply and blindly trust. Psychological studies of inattentional blindness (https://www.apa.org/monitor/apr01/blindness), for instance, illustrate how our human brains are often “hard-wired” to exclude information that does not fit into our current meaning system. We see what we expect to see – and can consistently miss things we are not anticipating or that don’t support our belief system. The following link has some nice examples of this phenomena (http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/videos.html).
2. Level two is referred to as the self-reflexive level.
I like to refer to this level as the awareness or opening of the eyes level. We start to become aware of how our experiences are conditioned by our social world. Personal reflection and meditation help us accomplish this. Scientists and spiritual teachers agree that the capacity for self-reflexivity – the ability to step back and reflect on our thought process – stimulates shifts in our mental representations. Meditation, confession, taking inventory of your behaviour in a 12-step program, or attending therapeutic sessions are some examples of activities that will develop self-reflection. Self-reflection helps us to become more self-aware as it helps us to analyse our own biases, which in turn results in us becoming aware of our perceptual blinders. Your eyes are opened! Once aware of these we can then start to change or to not change which is exactly what happens in Level 3.
3. Level Three is referred to as the engaged or movement phase of social consciousness.
At this stage, we are not only aware of the social environment, but begin to mobilize our intention to contribute to the greater good. There is a movement from “me” to “we,” as our awareness moves us to actively engage in the well-being of others and the world. There is also an expansion of perspective-taking, in which we get better at seeing things from another person’s point of view. Scientific data from interpersonal neurobiology (https://www.drdansiegel.com/about/interpersonal_neurobiology/) suggests that our brains develop through our connections to others. Other research indicates that we have built-in drives that spur us to search for purpose in our lives. This suggests that our brains are social organs. Perhaps this is what Jung referred to as the collective unconsciousness?
4. Level Four is known as the collaborative or the lifting off phase of social consciousness.
Gaining greater awareness of ourselves in relation to the social world may lead us to participate in co-creating solutions with others. Here we begin to shape the social environment through collaborative actions. Within education, for example, we find an increasing focus on participatory learning, service learning and project based learning – each was developed to enhance the nature of collaborative social consciousness through discourse and conversation. Online forums and blogs are some examples of groups that offer collaborative explorations and life-affirming actions.
5. Level Five is the resonant consciousness.
At this stage of development, people report a sense of essential interrelatedness with others. They describe a “field” of shared experience and emergence that is felt and expressed in social groups. Some ground breaking research conducted by IONS Institute of NOETIC Sciences (https://noetic.org/) , suggests measurable links between one person’s intention and another person’s physiological activity, revealing an underlying entanglement between us. Such studies are evocative and provide an empirical basis for connections that lie beyond our physical relations.
Scientists, scholars and contemplative teachers are finally beginning to work together to explore the ways in which people are conditioned by the biological, social and physical world in which they are embedded. In so doing, we can begin to recognize a broader picture of our collective human potential.
It seems like 5 relatively easy levels of development, but the reality is that we tend to have great difficulty to develop social consciousness. It seems to be shaped and influenced by the world we live in – social media, politics, religion, family, disaster/s, personal health etc – and seems to be fluid as it seems to change as we adapt to these external influences. In our next blog we will be looking at why it may be important to develop Social Consciousness as well as some ways in which to develop this.