WERE EARLY PEOPLE LESS INDIVIDUAL THAN OURSELVES?

Sometimes I hear it said that early, indigenous peoples are less individual than we moderns, more subsumed in collective consciousness. In fact, I heard someone quoted to this effect recently, who had spent years training with African medicine people. And I don't know if it is true and, if so, to what extent.

First of all, the 2 people I have known who belong to 'tribal' peoples and have had traditional trainings show no lack of independent thought. Someone else described to me being around a circle of aboriginal elders, and what he noticed was how distinct they all were in their characters. And then there is a piece written by Lewis Mehl-Madrona, who says that post-modernism, with its lack of absolute certainties, is hard for most people to live with - unless they are shamans, who get their power from this alignment with the flow of Spirit. And at the same time he says that, in his experience, most tribal people have a fairly simple set of certainties and beliefs by which they live. And he quotes another elder who said that to the effect that all creation stories are provisional, really we don't know how everything came to be.

Individual or Collective?

So I am of the opinion that people with wisdom, who you find amongst indigenous peoples worldwide, are not lacking in individual consciousness, far from it. I feel quite strongly about this, like it is a put-down, our modern arrogance, to categorise indigenous people in this way.

What remains, however, is your average indigenous person, who is not an elder/medicine person. And the question is are they significantly more subsumed in collective consciousness than we are? I don't know the answer to this question, because I have no experience. What does make me question it, however, is my experience of people in our own culture being less individual than they would like to think. 

 

I see it all the time in one-sided political opinions, where so many people seem unable to appreciate that there is any validity in views different to their own. They are, in other words, merely part of a righteous grouping. It does not appear so to themselves, however, and you cannot say it to them. Or the sense of certainty that people often attribute to our modern, scientific, creation stories, to the extent that you may be perceived as being wilfully contrary, or just irrational, if you question these assumptions. And when I do individual counselling sessions with people, the felt pressure to live or be a certain way, that comes from the collective, is nearly always a theme.

So regarding our own culture, my opinion is that while we value the room to be an individual, we are usually not nearly as individual as we would like to think. I have no reason to doubt that most indigenous peoples are/were subsumed within collective values/stories, because I think that is human nature, and I don't see anything wrong with that. What I do question is our modern assumption that we are beyond that, for I find the evidence all around me that we are not.