Trotter

 Wilfred Trotter is probably best known these days for two reasons. First, there is the wonderful mnemonic effect of his name. Who could ever forget, having once learned it, that "Trotter" was the man who popularized the concept of the "herd instinct" as a force in social life—especially when his surname evokes so well the gregarious quadrupeds to which he likens human society. 

Second, Trotter's chief work, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, is often recalled as one of a number of works from the same era (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) dealing with the psychology of human groups, often from a critical perspective. Along with with the works of Le Bon, Bernays, etc., Trotter is therefore sometimes seen as antidemocratic—and is even accused of paving the way, like these other writers, for the propaganda techniques of fascist dictators and their counter-parliamentary putsches for unilateral power. 

In a recent review, I argued that this is an unfair reading of Gustave Le Bon's politics. Now, having read Trotter's classic book on group psychology as well, I conclude that this is an even more misleading interpretation of Trotter. Whatever the political sins of his book (and there certainly are some), Trotter was no proto-fascist. 

Part of the confusion undoubtedly stems from the fact that people tend to assume that the concept of "herd instinct" is pejorative. Much to the contrary, however, Trotter uses the term as a synonym for the social instinct—the instinct of "gregariousness"—in general, and sees in it the roots of all that is best and noblest in human beings: our capacity for self-sacrifice, our altruism, our moral ideals, the possibility of voluntarism taking the place of coercion in human relations, etc. If we share aspects of this instinct in common with sheep, wolves, ants, and other social animals, this is merely because we have an evolutionary history in common. 

There are aspects of the book, to be sure, that have not aged well. Trotter betrays an elitism that is characteristic of progressive writers from the era. He speaks vaguely but insistently of the need for "leadership," and "conscious direction" over the human herd—and to the extent he describes his ideal ruler or aristocracy, it becomes clear that the person he has in mind is someone much like himself. How typical. Herbert Croly, another political writer from the era, thought that the future lay in the hands of "critics." Trotter thinks it belongs to the scientists. Any guess to which profession each man belonged? 

But if there is a certain flavor of totalitarianism in some of Trotter's writing, it is of a decidedly left-wing rather than right-wing variety. His notion of utopia resembles something like the "golden singing hive" which Stephen Spender forecast, in one of his Marxist-influenced poems of the 1930s. Indeed, Trotter repeatedly invokes the example of bees, when he wishes to describe his political ideals; but he does not see in them a model for an earthly dictatorship or a rigid class hierarchy. To the contrary, he appeals to the notion of the innate "moral equality" of humankind, and sees the ultimate trajectory of human evolution as bending toward ever greater amounts of voluntarism, equality of status, and altruistic collectivism. 

I suspect that most people, if they are superficially acquainted with Trotter through the secondary literature, would be surprised at this. They might assume that his emphasis on the idea of the "herd" portrayed human beings as either sheep, ready to be bossed around by any dictator with the temerity to proclaim himself their shepherd, or as wolves—fit to be unified into a homogeneous hunting pack for purposes of the conquest and domination of weaker groups (this assumption is responsible in turn, most likely, for the aura of "proto-fascism" that still hangs over the popular recollection of Trotter's work). 

Indeed, this was my own understanding of Trotter's thesis, before I'd actually read his book. It turns out, however, that Trotter expressly rejects both visions of human society. 

To be sure, Trotter does see—and discuss at length—elements of both the sheep and the wolf in humankind. But he does not think these exhaust the limits of the human "herd instinct"—still less does he see either as an ideal we should strive to resemble. 

He acknowledges that human beings in groups are often susceptible to rumor and disinformation—especially at times of perceived danger, such as a war, which they see as threatening the entire herd. To this extent, human beings may be somewhat sheeplike. But he certainly does not see this as a good thing, or as something that would-be dictators ought to exploit. 

To the extent that he discusses demagogues who try to pervert and misdirect the human "herd instinct" for their own ends, he writes of them with contempt. And who, bearing today's demagogues in mind, could say that his description is wrong? In describing the most effective leaders of sheep, Trotter observes that they must become sheep in order to direct them, "louder, coarser, above all with more urgent wants and ways of expression than the common sheep, but in essence to their feeling of the same flesh with them." Who can read that today and not think it a perfect description of Trump? 

The polity-as-sheepfold is certainly one approach that society can take to organizing itself. But it is plainly, in Trotter's view, not the best one that humanity can strive for. 

So too, it is possible to create a model of human-society-as-wolf-pack. This is the structure, Trotter observes, approximated by some of the Germanic hordes of late antiquity and the middle ages. One could also cite the Mongol raiders, Attila's Huns, or the Viking warriors as examples of what Trotter aptly calls the "lupine" form of human collectivity. All these groups survived not by engaging in productive activity themselves, but through predation on others. 

And of course, since Trotter's book was partially written amidst the mental atmosphere of the First World War, he also compares the German Empire of Kaiser Wilhelm to a sort of organized wolf pack, organized and united solely for purposes of conquest, domination, and violence. The tone in which Trotter wrote much of this section in 1915 evidently caused him some embarrassment later on. In a postscript appended in 1919, after the war's end, he laments that it is impossible to avoid "national bias" when attempting to reflect on any social or political topic in wartime, and admits that he fell into the same psychological trap in the first part of his book. But he allows his main conclusions to stand: the Germany of the Prussian junker elite, he writes, was a warrior state organized along fundamentally "lupine" principles. 

Trotter does not, however, think this is in any way a good thing—he is no more advocating the adoption of the lupine organization of society than he is the ovine one. To the contrary, he suggests that there is a third option—one represented chiefly by England, but also by countries like the United States. And while there must have been some national feeling and even chauvinism in his preference for this model, what he describes as the quintessentially English way of expressing the herd instinct could simply be described as liberalism—or even as social democracy. 

What is crucial—in my mind—is that he does not only defend the liberal model as morally preferable to the wolfish one; he also regards it as stronger and more durable than the dictatorial, homogeneous ovine or lupine models. 

This is where people have been most inclined to get Trotter wrong in the past; and where I think he still has the most to teach us today. 

Exposed to a simplistic version of Trotter's biological conception of human society, many people might assume that he is advocating for a simple model of survival of the fittest. They might think the only proper conclusion to draw is that human societies should aim to achieve the homogeneity of the animal herd, because this will help with the goals of "intercommunication" and collective unity that Trotter describes as essential to group survival. And to be sure, there are some passages in Trotter that would lend themselves to such an interpretation. 

To come away from his book with only these lessons in hand, however, would be a very superficial reading of his thesis. After all, Trotter's point is partly that animals (including humans) form groups precisely in order to mitigate the raw forces of natural selection. 

He argues that, by organizing themselves in collectivities that protect all their members—including the relatively weak—groups are able to preserve a level of diversity and "variation" that could not be attained if they were cast individually into a Hobbesian state of nature—a war of all against all. And this great variation, in turn, is what allows those larger collective aggregates to thrive. Blunting the force of natural selection as it applies to each individual, that is to say, actually improves the adaptability and chances of survival of the group as a whole.

In order to elucidate this point, Trotter gives the analogy of the advantages of multicellular organisms over single-celled ones. Organisms that have only a single cellular unit, each one competing against the others, often quickly attain a certain uniformity. By contrast, multicellular organisms—because they provide a degree of relative insulation for each constituent cell—allow for cells to take a wide variety of forms within the overall organism. 

This confers the enormous benefits of specialization on the larger organism. When each cell can do one thing unusually well, then, even if they do other things poorly, the overall organism still benefits from their presence. The organism as a whole can do all the things well that all its specialized members can do well, while protecting each of these members from the immediate effects of competition, in which their areas of weakness would be a greater liability. 

The analogy to societies is obvious—and Trotter does not hesitate to draw it. Societies organized into "herds" actually benefit from internal diversity and variety. They are strengthened by this variety. Because this is what enables their members to specialize.

This is the aspect of Trotter's outlook that is most fundamentally liberal, and in which his profound incompatibility with fascism becomes most obvious. Trotter is not the sort of reactionary or racist socio-biologist that one might have expected, given the era in which he wrote. To the contrary, he rejects these forms of socio-biology as spurious pseudo-science. 

He points out that the types of "social Darwinists" who see only the selective struggle for fitness and competition for resources in human relations are unable to explain the phenomena of altruism and voluntarism that are everywhere present in human societies. He argues that they have failed to grasp a crucial fact of biology: gregarious animals, including human beings, but including also our insect and quadruped kindred, organize into collectives that protect internal diversity and variety—and they do this not in a way inconsistent with the principles of Darwinism, but rather precisely because these things confer evolutionary advantages on the group. 

Hence, the impulse to shield and protect the weak that we find in all human societies is not an evolutionary anomaly or a counter-adaptive perversity. Contrary to what the "social Darwinists" might think, it is a highly adaptive trait for societies to preserve. By protecting all the herd's members, including the weak and sick, we blunt the force of natural selection that would otherwise enforce a bland uniformity among our members. 

We thereby unlock the advantages of specialization that diversity offers. We also obtain a greater degree of genetic variation within the group, which—as more modern evolutionary biologists would add, in the wake of the modern synthesis with Mendelian genetics—is essential for adaptivity. The more variation, the more adaptation. 

Trotter is therefore offering the opposite of the fascist version of socio-biology. He expressly rejects racist and nationalistic schools of socio-biology as pseudo-scientific cant. And he also gives us sound reasons for opposing either a ruthless program of "survival of the fittest" or the active pursuit of ethnic and racial "homogeneity" as models for social policy. A war of all against all, in which only the "strong" survive, would select only for people with a specific, generalized kind of physical strength. It would therefore deprive the larger society of the many benefits conferred on the group by the specialization of skill sets and the division of labor that a greater diversity of character types can bring.

Likewise with a policy of enforced "homogeneity"—it would actually kill variability at its source, when variability is precisely the advantage that social animals seek to obtain by organizing themselves into collectivities in the first place. 

This is why, as Trotter points out, England turned out to be actually much stronger than the Germans gave them credit for. Despite its apparent fractiousness, lack of "conscious direction," and disorganization, the country actually displayed a stronger unity of purpose when it counted. This is no doubt because liberal societies are actually stronger than authoritarian ones. They are able to seize upon the benefits of internal diversity and variation in a way that militarized "pack" societies cannot. 

This is a very important lesson for us to heed today. In recent years, neo-fascism, as an ideology, has made a stunning resurgence into the political mainstream in Western Europe and the United States. Backed by the likes of Tucker Carlson, the ideological currents of neo-fascism often portray the racial and cultural diversity of the United States as a source of "weakness." They conflate our diversity and internal variation with a lack of unity or national purpose. They argue that unity can only come through ethnic, racial, and religious homogeneity. Likewise, they deplore the proliferation of nonconforming sexual subcultures and lifestyles—for instance, they see LGBTQ+ people as a threat to the nation's sexual health. 

To the extent that these neo-fascists have any ideal in their minds, it is plainly the "lupine" model of society. They want to see the United States become an ethnically homogeneous warrior state, with rigidly defined gender roles, rather than being the large, diverse, fractious, polyglot society that it currently is. What's more, they see such an approach to the "lupine" model as the only way to preserve our national strength and avoid the perils of degeneracy. 

Yet, the neo-fascists are wrong as a factual matter. Despite all the accusations of "degeneracy," "weakness," and "decadence" that fascists have lobbed at liberal parliamentary societies over the last century or more, these societies have actually proven in practice to be the most stable, prosperous, and militarily effective societies of them all. It was England and America that won the two world wars. It is the liberal democratic United States now that has the world's largest economy and military—not Vladimir Putin's neo-medieval and increasingly "lupine" version of Russia, which American neo-fascists like Carlson would prefer we emulate.

The "lupine" model, then, does not actually seem to correlate with national strength. Whereas cultural, racial, and sexual diversity do. 

With Trotter's theories in hand, we now have some means of explaining this otherwise curious fact of the success and durability of multicultural liberal societies. If we had only the theories of social Darwinism to work with, such success would indeed be hard to explain. But these theories, as Trotter explains, leave out of account the selective advantages to groups as a whole of preserving internal diversity. 

On Trotter's theory, we can begin to understand why societies are actually hobbled by preserving rigid gender roles, or by allowing their weak and sick members to perish unaided—by doing so, they deprive themselves of the advantages of specialization. They produce only a single generic warrior male type and a single childbearing female type—a Siegfried and Brunhild, perhaps—who are only good at a relatively small range of things. And the society as a whole is thereby culturally, economically, and even militarily impoverished. 

The liberal democratic and social democratic society toward which modern liberalism is developing, therefore, is not merely a gratuitously kind-hearted departure from the rigor and cruelty of raw evolutionary pressures. It is not merely a triumph of human moral sentiments over the heartless state of nature. It is doubtless those things as well—but it is also something more. It is the best possible way of leveraging the evolutionary advantages of human diversity in all its forms—sexual, social, cultural, racial, linguistic, and religious. 

How unfair it must appear, then—having come to this conclusion—that Trotter should go down in the history books as a theorist of proto-fascism! He should better be recalled to us today as a liberal prophet. He has given us the best socio-biological account yet of why "open" societies thrive far better than closed ones.