Page 134 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

Iii The Development of Normative Structures

ing the same. The individual lifetime too is schematized on different
levels of cognitive development; but it is objectively bounded, at least
by birth and death. There are no comparable objective cut-off points
for the historical existence of a society, with its overreaching genera-
tions and, often, epochs.
b. Furthermore, collective identity determines how a society demar-
cates itself from its natural and social environments. In this respect
too, clear analogies [to individual life} are lacking. A personal life-
world is bounded by the horizon of all possible experiences and actions
that can be attributed to the individual in his exchange with his social
environment. By contrast, the symbolic boundaries of a society are
formed primarily as the horizon of the actions that members recipro-
cally attribute to themselves internally.
c. The third feature is all the more important—collective identity
regulates the membership of individuals in the society (and exclusion
therefrom). In this respect there is a complementary relation between
ego and group identity, because the unity of the person is formed
through relations to other persons of the same group; and as J men-
tioned above, identity development is characterized by the fact that
early identification with concrete and less complex groups (the family)
is weakened and subordinated to identification with more encompass-
ing and more abstract units (city, state). This suggests that we can
infer from the ontogenetic stages of ego development the comple-
mentary social structures of the tribal group, the state, and, finally,
global forms of intercourse. Elsewhere I advanced certain conjectures
to that effect; °1 but I see now that I underestimated the complexity
of the connection of collective identities with world views and systems
of norms. Following Parsons, we can distinguish cultural values, ac-
tions systems in which values are institutionalized, and collectives that
act in these systems. Only a certain segment of the culture and action
system is important for the identity of a collective—namely the taken-
for-granted, consensual, basic values and institutions that enjoy a kind
of fundamental validity in the group. Individual members of the
group perforce experience the destruction or violation of this norma-
tive core as a threat to their own identity. The different forms of col-
lective identity can be found only in such normative cores, in which
individual members “know themselves as one” with each other.

In neolithic societies collective identity was secured through the
fact that individuals traced their descent to the figure of a com-
mon ancestor and thus, in the framework of their mythological