When I moved to a small city a
few years ago, after living for twenty years in a very small town, I noticed I
felt an upsurge in creativity. I had been living in an isolated mountain valley
and believed the peace and quiet were conducive to creativity, so this feeling
surprised me. It was if I could feel the energy of the people around me. I thought
maybe it was specific to the city I had moved to, which is a creative place,
but after reading an interesting article in the February 2014 National Geographic I’ve changed my
mind.
“Karma of the Crowd,” by Laura
Spinney, is about the beneficial aspects of being around large groups of
people, and uses as an example the large annual religious festival in India
called Maha Kumbh Mela. I’ve always heard of the negative effects of crowds like
mob mentality, but as Spinney writes,
There’s an energy coming off this crowd, a sense that it amounts to more than the sum of its parts. The French 19th century sociologist Emile Durkheim coined a phrase for it: collective effervescence. He was convinced it had a positive impact on individuals’ health. His ideas were sidelined during the mass violence of the 20th century, but perhaps he was on to something. Have crowds been misunderstood?
In the West there’s a pervasive idea that when people congregate, they surrender their individual identity, along with their ability to reason and behave morally—some of the very qualities that make us human.
“What our research shows is that, actually, crowds are critical to society,” says psychologist Stephen Reicher of the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom. “They help form our sense of who we are, they help form our relations to others, they even help determine our physical well-being.”
