The Wisdom [?] of Swarms

Rambling around the internet. Random links for further reading and thought:

"Blink vs. The Wisdom of Crowds." Slate's dialogue between Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki.

An article on collective wisdom and investing. PDF.

And another one.

Apparently, this is a big topic in the internet world over whether website indexing for search and ranking purposes is best done by algorithms or by social networking. Here's a blog + discussion about the problem of information overload and the digg problematic.

"Why the Wisdom of Crowds Fails on Digg" [may be outdated]

"Weblogs and the Wisdom of Crowds". The title says it all.

A somewhat contrarian view: Web 2.0 and the stupidity of crowds.

Here, start your own social network at Ning.

Of course, if you follow the logic of our images, you will have noted our use of the Wikipedia logo. Wikis are collaborative efforts precisely geared to amass information from a crowd of sources. The debate concerns the wisdom of this. Certainly, a tremendous amount of information can be amassed. Information, however, does not equate to wisdom. And this is not at all personal in the way Canetti discusses.

Here's an article on the species wisdom of Homo sapiens sapiens.

Swarm Sense

Some crowds form spontaneously. People are swept up into them and lose themselves within them. In our brief quotes from The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West gave us a portrait of what it was like—from the point of view of the resister, the individual who is unwilling to give over his identity to that of the swelling mass. This is an American type. He makes the choice to resist, but larger forces carry him against his will, wounding him in the process. West seems to be telling us this is the fate of the willful individual in modern times (much as Elias Canetti does, to a more tragic effect, in his brilliant novel Auto-da-Fe). Remember, too, Ayn Rand's explicitly polemical novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged—unsubtle reactionary paeans to unabashed selfishness.

But these situations are less interesting than the situation where the individual willingly gives over her identity to that of the crowd; chooses, that is to say, to go with the flow of the crowd, to abandon himself for the sake of the group identity. Some examples we've identified: religious services, the march to war, lynch mobs, sporting events, musical performances, movies. I'm sure there are others. What is the trade-off? What do we get out of it when we abandon ourselves? There must be some reward.

Paradoxically, Canetti locates this reward in the complex, deep-seated fear of being touched:

There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. ... It is only in a crowd that man can become free of this fear of being touched. That is the only situation in which the fear changes into its opposite. The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body; a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch. Ideally, all are equal there; no distinctions count, not even that of sex. The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body. This is perhaps one of the reasons why a crowd seeks to close in on itself: it wants to rid each individual as completely as possible of the fear of being touched. The more fiercely people press together, the more certain they feel that they do not fear each other. This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of crowds. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is greatest." Crowds and Power, pp. 15-16.

This seems apt—as far as it goes. It helps to explain situations like the one pictured above from Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will. It works for riots, mobs, rock concerts and raves, and other similar immediate crowd phenomena. It does not explain the atavistic desire to be part of a unifying crowd where one is not forcibly thrown against other bodies: most religious services and operas and movies, for example. Sporting events too, for the most part. Nor does it help us get our arms around the crowd sense formed by the use of mass media for political, commercial, or aesthetic purposes.

We will call "crowd sense" those cultural phenomena that create (for the most part) non-physical, non-touching type crowds formed around a common emotional experience. Political propaganda musters a populace to embrace a particular point of view. Advertising creates a receptive crowd of potential consumers. Recording artists, poets, novelists, movie-makers, painters, sculptors, etc. attempt to create a unified "aesthetic experience" in their viewers, readers, and listeners. Television evangelists create crowds of hopeful donors. These are, for the most part, non-simultaneous and non-physical crowds; but they are crowds nonetheless with all the attributes we've been examining. No doubt there are more. But the point we keep returning to is the metaphorical point of the West snippet: what is the fate of the individual resistant to the main cultural forces crowding him into a political position (however well-considered), consumer products, artistic tastes, and benefaction/faith?

Is there ever a "swarm sense" or common sense that makes sense? Is there such a thing as the "wisdom of the crowd"? Homework assignment: read this article "The Genius of Swarms" from National Geographic magazine before we reconvene.

[More to follow]

Some Swarms

We've been theme-blogging about swarms.  Shoals of fish, crowds, swarms of bees, swallows, bats, etc.  We find it difficult to understand how such a large group can seemingly act as one.  What is the connective tissue?

There is a simultaneity sometimes in human affairs.  Scheler identified a community of feeling.  We postulated that certain primitive emotions could generate this sort of mass behavior in people:  fear, hatred, grief—the sorts of pre-verbal emotions that can take us over and cause us to let go of ourselves and act as part of a crowd in an unmediated way.  When are some of the times we find ourselves acting in these ways?

When we attend a musical concert:  whether it's Mozart or Motorhead, Aida or The Star-Spangled Banner, the aesthetic idea is to create an emotional response in the audience.  And for those moments, the crowd is responding emotionally as one.

When mass disasters strike:  we've pointed out how the outpouring of sympathy and offers of aid accompanied the recent events in Myanmar and China, not to mention the recent tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, etc.

When we go to war:  the nation must be sold on the necessity of the war for its own interests.  It must march as one.  Nationalism, tribalism, etc. are powerful forces related to fear, hatred of the other, and love for those who are in our own group.

When we attend religious services:  the liturgy is designed for the sole purpose of uniting us in a religious feeling.  The sense of security which a benevolent deity gives us cows us into a feeling of submission, self-abnegation, gratitude, reverence.

When we attend sporting events (and to a lesser extent watch them on television):  each of us is moved by the fate of our home team.  Joy, sorrow, hatred of the other, love of our group.

At these moments, we make the decision to forego our individuality and relinquish our identity; to become a member of the crowd.  Other times, we are swept up in the crowd without our conscious choice:  for example, when we become the victims of some disaster such as an oncoming tidal wave or volcano or hurricane or invasion or other atrocity.  There are, I'm sure, others mostly related to fear.

Then there are events, such as riots and mobs, which are less clear-cut.  Economic panics or bubbles, for example, which seem to overpower the participants and take on a life of their own.

Can you think of others?

The Swarm

[This is a continuation of the series of blogposts on Swarms. Of course, what prompted this sequence was the set of posts on recent natural disasters beginning here and the initial sense of a unified outpouring of sympathy.]

We've seen what it's like to be caught up in a disorienting swarm of other animals and wondered what force united these fish, insects, birds, bats, etc. We've speculated that, in human beings, it is akin to such primitive emotions as fear, hate, etc. Nathanael West has shown us what it's like to be a part of a swarm of our fellow humans: the helplessness of being caught up in something that is greater than ourselves, the vain struggle to extricate and differentiate one's self from the swirling chaos, the heedlessness of the crowd to the individual's pain, the amorality and disinhibition of those who are caught up in an anonymous herd, the grasping for comfort in memory and art to help explain what's happening to us. West even suggests some causes of this sort of swarm behavior, pulling in everything from movie star hype to moral outrage. It is too easy to lose one's self in the swarm, to let go the lonely struggle to set one's self apart—dare we say it, to transcend.

Others have observed and commented on this phenomenon in various contexts:

"there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own." J.S. Mill, On Liberty Ch. 1.

"Inasmuch as at all times, as long as there have been human beings, there have also been herds of men (clans, communites, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many people who obeyed, compared with the small number of those commanding—considering, then, that nothing has been exercised and cultivated better and longer among men so far than obedience—it may fairly be assumed that the need for it is now innate in the average man, as a kind of formal conscience that commands: 'thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally not do something else,' in short, 'thou shalt.' ... In the last analysis, 'love of the neighbor' is always something secondary, partly conventional and arbitrary—illusory in relation to fear of the neighbor. ... The highest and strongest drives, when they break out passionately and drive the individual far above the average and the flats of the herd conscience, wreck the self-confidence of the community, its faith in itself, and it is as if its spine snapped. Hence just these drives are branded and slandered most. High and independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, even a powerful reason are experienced as dangers; everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors."  F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil Secs. 199, 201.

"Differences only arise through individuation ... The unconscious consists, among other things, of remnants of the undifferentiated archaic psyche, including its animal stages. The reactions and products of the animal psyche have a uniformity and constancy of which we seem able to discover only sporadic traces in man. Man seems to us far more individual than the animals. This may perhaps be a delusion, since we have in us a convenient tendency to discern differences mainly in the things which interest us. ..." C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation p. 176.

"the facts of man's collective life easily rob the average individual of confidence in the human enterprise. The inevitable hypocrisy, which is associated with all of the collective activities of the human race, springs chiefly from this source: that individuals have a moral code which makes the actions of collective man an outrage to their conscience. They therefore invent romantic and moral interpretations of the real facts, preferring to obscure rather than reveal the true character of their collective behavior. Sometimes they are as anxious to offer moral justifications for the brutalities from which they suffer as for those which they commit. The fact that the hypocrisy of man's group behavior ... expresses itself not only in terms of self-justification but in terms of moral justification of human behavior in general, symbolises one of the tragedies of the human spirit: Its inability to conform its collective life to its individual ideals. As individuals, men believe that they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command." Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society pp. 8-9.

"Freud tried to approach crowd phenomena from the point of view of the unconscious, but he did not see clearly, he did not see that the unconscious itself was fundamentally a crowd. ... Elias Canetti distinguished between two types of multiplicity that are sometimes opposed but at other times interpenetrate: mass ('crowd') multiplicities and pack multiplicities. Among the characteristics of a mass, in Canetti's sense, we should not large quantity, divisibility and equality ofthe members, concentration, sociability of the aggregate as a whole, one-way hierarchy, organization of territoriality or territorialization, and emission of signs. Among the characteristics of a pack are small or restricted numbers, dispersion, nondecomposable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines of deterritorialization, and projection of particles. Doubtless, there is no more equality or any less hierarchy in packs than in masses, but they are of a different kind. The leader of the pack or the band plays move by move, must wager everything every hand, whereas the group or mass leader consolidates or capitalizes on past gains. The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is a component part of it, and to which it accredits a high positive value, whereas masses only integrate these lines in order to segment them, obstruct them, ascribe them a negative sign. Canetti notes that in a pack each member is alone even in the company of others (for example, wolves on the hunt; each takes care of himself at the same time as participating in the band). 'In the changing constellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions, he will again and again find himself at its edge. He may be in the center, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge again; at the edge and then back in the center. When the pack forms a ring around the fire, each man will have neighbors to the right and left, but no one behind him; his back is naked and exposed to the wilderness.'" Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus pp. 29, 33-34.

"Baudelaire had the true intuition of number as a tactile hand or nervous system for interrelating separate units, when he said that 'number is within the individual. Intoxication is a number.' That explains why 'the pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious expression of delight in the multiplication of number.' Number, that is to say, is not only auditory and resonant, like the spoken word, but originates in the sense of touch, of which it is an extension. The statistical aggregation or crowding of numbers yields the current cave-drawings or finger-paintings of the statisticians' charts. In every sense the amassing of numbers statistically gives man a new influx of primitive intuition and magically subconscious awareness, whether of public taste or feeling: 'You feel better satisfied when you use well-known brands.'" Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media p. 107.

[More to follow]

Swarming (cont'd)

[This is the concluding paragraphs of Nathanael West's magisterial novel, The Day of the Locust. Before reading it, you should at least read the previous post—if not the entire book. It's also a pretty good movie that prefigures, in many respects, the Coen brothers' excellent "Barton Fink."]

"In this part of the mob no one was hysterical. In fact, most of the people seemed to be enjoying themselves. Near him was a stout woman with a man pressing hard against her from in front. His chin was on her shoulder, and his arms were around her. She paid no attention to him and went on talking to th woman at her side.

"The first thing I knew," Tod heard her say, "There was a rush and I was in the middle."

"Yeah. Somebody hollered, 'Here comes Gary Cooper,' and then wham!"

"That ain't it," said a little man wearing a cloth cap and pullover sweater. "This is a riot you're in."

"Yeah," said a third woman, whose snaky gray hair was hanging over her face and shoulders. "A pervert attacked a child."

"He ought to by lynched."

Everybody agreed vehemently.

"I come from St. Louis," announced the stout woman, "and we had one of them pervert fellers in our neighborhood once. He ripped up a girl with a pair of scissors."

"He must have been crazy," said the man in the cap. "What kind of fun is that?"

Everybody laughed. The stout woman spoke to the man who was hugging her.

"Hey, you," she said. "I ain't no pillow."

The man smiled beatifically but didn't move. She laughed, making no effort to get out of his embrace.

"A fresh guy," she said.

The other woman laughed.

"Yeah," she said, "this is a regular free-for-all."

The man in the cap and sweater thought there was another laugh in his comment about the pervert.

"Ripping up a girl with scissors. That's the wrong tool."

He was right. They laughed even louder than the first time.

"You'd a done it different, eh, kid?" said a young man with a kidney-shaped head and waxed moustaches.

The two women laughed. This encouraged the man in the cap and he reached over and pinched the stout woman's friend. She squealed.

"Lay off that," she said good-naturedly.

"I was shoved," he said.

An ambulance siren screamed in the street. Its wailing moan started the crowd moving again and Tod was carried along in a slow, steady push. He closed his eyes and tried to protect his throbbing leg. This time, when the movement ended, he found himself with his back to the theatre wall. He kept his eyes closed and stood on his good leg. After what seemed like hours, the pack began to loosen and move again with a churning motion. It gathered momentum and rushed. He rode it until he was slammed against the base of an iron rail which fenced the driveway of the theatre from the street. He had the wind knocked out of him by the impact, but managed to cling to the rail. He held on desperately, fighting to keep from being sucked back. A woman caught him around the waist and tried to hang on. She was sobbing rhythmically. Tod felt his fingers slipping from the rail and kicked backwards as hard as he could. The woman let go.

Despite the agony in his leg, he was able to think clearly about his picture, "The Burning of Los Angeles." After his quarrel with Faye, he had worked on it continually to escape tormenting himself, and the way to it in his mind had become almost automatic.

As he stood on his good leg, clinging desperately to the iron rail, he could see all the rough charcoal strokes with which he had blocked it out on the big canvas. Across the top, parallel with the frame, he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. For the face of its members, he was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die; the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers—all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super "Dr. Know-All Pierce-All" had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames.

In the lower foreground, men and women fled wildly before the vanguard of th crusading mob. Among them were Faye, Harry, Homer, Claude and himself. Faye ran proudly, throwing her knees high. Harry stumbled along behind her, holding on to his beloved derby hat with both hands. Homer seemed to be falling out of the canvas, his face half-asleep, his big hands clawing the air in anguished pantomime. Claude turned his head as he ran to thumb his nose at his pursuers. Tod himself picked up a small stone to throw before continuing his flight.

He had almost forgotten both his leg and his predicament, and to make his escape still more complete he stood on a chair and worked at the flames in an upper corner of the canvas, modeling the tongues of fire so tht they licked even more avidly at a corinthian column that held up the palmleaf roof of a nutburger stand.

He had finihsed one flame and was starting one another when he was brought back by someone shouting in his ear. He opened his eyes and saw a policeman trying to reach him from behind the rail to which he was clinging. He let go with his left hand and raised his arm. The policeman caught him by the wrist, but couldn't lift him. Tod was afraid to let go until another man came to aid the policeman and caught him by the back of his jacket. He let go of the rail andthey hauled him up and over it.

When they saw that he couldn't stand, they let him down easily to the ground. He was in the theatre driveway. On the curb next to him sat a woman crying into her skirt. Along the wall were groups of other disheveled people. At the end of th driveway was an ambulance. A policeman asked him if he wanted to go to the hospital. He shook his head no. He then offered him a lift home. Tod had the presence of mind to give Claude's address.

He was carried through the exit to the back street and lifted into a police car. The siren began to scream and at first he thought he was making the noise himself. He felt his lips with his hands. They were clamped tight. He knew then it was the siren. For some reason this made him laugh and he began to imitate the siren as loud as he could." Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust.

Swarming (cont'd)

"The next thing Tod knew, he was torn loose from Homer and sent to his knees by a blow in the back of the head that spun him sideways. The crowd in front of the theatre had charged. He was surrounded by churning legs and feet. He pulled himself erect by grabbing a man's coat, then let himself be carried along backwards in a long, curving swoop. He saw Homer rise above the mass for a moment, shoved against the sky, his jaw hanging as though he wanted to scream but couldn't. A hand reached up and caught him by his open mouth and pulled him forward and down.

There was another dizzy rush. Tod closed his eyes and fought to keep upright. He was jostled about in a hacking cross surf of shoulders and backs, carried rapidly in one direction and then in the opposite. He kept pushing and hitting out at the people around him, trying to face in the direction he was going. Being carried backwards terrified him.

Using the eucalyptus tee as a landmark, he tried to work toward it by slipping sideways against the tide, pushing hard when carried away from it and riding the current when it moved toward his objective. He was within only a few feet of the tree when a sudden, driving rush carried him far past it. He struggled desperately for a moment, then gave up and let himself be swept along. He was the spearhead of a flying wedge when it collided with a mass going in the opposite direction. The impact turned him around. As the two forces ground against each other, he was turned again and again, like a grain between millstones. This didn't stop until be became part of the opposing force. The pressure continued to increase until he thought he must collapse. He was slowly being pushed into the air. Although relief for his cracking ribs could be gotten by continuing to rise, he fought to keep his feet on the gournd. Not being able to touch was an even more dreadful sensation than being carried backwardss.

There was another rush, shorter this time, and he found himself in a dead spot where the pressure was less and equal. He became conscious of a terrible pain in his left leg, just above the ankle, and tried to work it into a more comfortable position. He couldn't turn his body, but managed to get his head around. A very skinny boy, wearing a Western Union cap, had his back wedged against his shoulder. The pain continued to grow and his whole leg as high as the groing throbbed. He finally got his left arm free and took the back of the boy's neck in his fingers. He twisted as hard as he could. The boy began to jump up and down in his clothes. He managed to straighten his elbow, by pushing at the back of the boy's head, and so turn halfway around and free his leg. The pain didn't grow less.

There was another wild surge forward that ended in another dead spot. He now faced a young girl who was sobbing steadily. Her silk print dress had been torn down the front and her tiny brassiere hung from one strap. He tried by pressing back to give her room, but she moved with him every time he moved. Now and then, she would jerk violently and he wondered if she was going to have a fit. One of her thighs was between his legs. He struggled to get free of her, but she clung to him, moving with him and pressing against him.

She turned her head and said, "Stop, stop," to someone behind her.

He saw what the trouble was. An old man, wearing a Panama hat and horn-rimmed glasses, was hugging her. He had one of his hands insider her dress and was biting her neck.

Tod freed his right arm with a heave, reached over the girl and brought his fist down on the man's head. He couldn't hit very hard but managed to knock the man's hat off, also his glasses. The man tried to bury his face in the girl's shoulder, but Tod grabbed one of his ears and yanked. They started to move again. Tod held on to the ear as long as he could hoping that it would come away in his hand. The girl managed to twist under his arm. A piece of her dress tore, but she was free of her attacker.

Another spasm passed through the mob and he was carried toward the curb. He fought toward a lamp-post, but he was swept by before he could grasp it. He saw another man catch the girl with the torn dress. She screamed for help. He tried to get to her, but was carried in the opposite direction. This rush also ended in a dead spot. Here his neighbors were all shorter than he was. He turned his head upward toward the sky and tried to pull some fresh air into his aching lungs, but it was all heavily tainted with sweat. ..." Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust.

[More to follow]

More Swarms

The profundity of my disorientation while in the midst of the swarming bait ball, I'm sure, was a function of the amount of fish, the intensity of their swirling behavior, and their proximity to me. Tens of thousands of silvery fish engulfed me in a flickering whirlwind of erratic activity. I panicked. What's more, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't follow them with my eyes, much less keep up with them. I was a radically alien species and could neither receive whatever signals kept them moving in unison nor react and move as efficiently through the clear blue Caribbean waters. My neurons did not fire nearly so rapidly.

Our premise is that these simultaneous behaviors in fish, swallows, and bats (and others such as lemmings, locust, jellyfish, bacteria, etc.) are somehow evolutionarily akin to human emotions. More primitive, perhaps. More direct. More powerful. But different only in degree, not kind.

The swarm, it seems, perceives and responds as one. It makes sense that in the human animal—whose responses are capable of being mediated by thought or imagination or memory, for example—for the response to come close to being so unified, the stimulus must be powerful and primitive. Put another way, the more direct and primitive the emotion stirred, the more unified the community of feeling (to borrow Scheler's term).

What are the more primitive emotions? Awe, surely. Fear, yes. Anger, likely. Lust. Pride. Distrust. Disgust. Sorrow. Joy. All these are good candidates. But we're not so much interested in a taxonomy of the primitive emotions as in the power of these intense emotions to provoke an unmediated response in us.

The significance of human emotional responses, it seems to me, is governed by two factors: intensity and proximity. The more intense the cause, the less proximate it needs to be to arouse our sympathy. Thus, the shock of 100,000 instantaneous deaths in a flood or tsunami occurring anywhere in the world will affect us strongly and prompt a response, though the deaths of 10 or 100 or even 1000 occurring remotely might not. Whereas, one person killed in a swollen creek in our own neighborhood catches us up.

Similarly, intensity is a feature of two factors: time and presence. Thus, 150,000 deaths in England or France or China (any country which has a media presence and an ability to publicize its disaster—one whose affairs are deemed 'newsworthy') will affect us more than, say, half a million deaths in Rwanda or Congo. Or, 150,000 instant deaths in Southeast Asia will affect us more than, say, 150,000 deaths in the U.S. this year due to lung cancers resulting from cigarette smoking or 43,000 deaths due to automobile accidents in one year. Though, one death to a family member or close friend or work colleague due to any one of these causes affects any of us profoundly.

We end today with a quote from Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power:

Men's feeling for their own increase has always been strong. The large numbers of the herds they hunted blended in their feelings with their own numbers which they wished to be large. They expressed this feeling in a specific state of communal excitement which I call the rhythmic or throbbing crowd.

Their excitement grows and reaches frenzy, until they are all doing the same thing. They all swing their arms to and fro, and shake their heads. In the end, there appears to be a single creature dancing, a creature with fifty heads and a hundred legs and arms, all acting in exactly the same way and with the same purpose. When their excitement is at its height, these people really feel as one, and nothing but physical exhaustion can stop them.

The fact that wars can last so long and may be carried on well after they have been lost arises from the deep urge of the crowd not to disintegrate; to remain a crowd. This feeling is sometimes so strong that people prefer to perish together with open eyes rather than acknowledge defeat and thus experience the disintegration of their own crowd.

[More to follow]

Swarms

Ever go snorkeling or diving and find yourself in the midst of a swarm of small fry? They swirl this way and that simultaneously. Dipping and diving, swerving and climbing, round and round. It's vertiginous. You find yourself enclosed in a dense ball and become disoriented. You can't see the light from the surface. You can't tell whether you're right-side up or upside down. And there's no foothold because you are swimming. You don't know whether you're moving through the water or whether it's moving around you. You don't know whether you're going to crash into a rock or mound of coral. You become still and begin to hold your breath or gasp for air waiting for the moving wall of fish to sweep past. Then panic sets in because it dawns on you that all these small fry could be fleeing some large predators that're going to emerge out of the dense cloud of silvery fish. After a moment of confusion, the mass of fish moves on and you regain your orientation. You head for the surface or breathe through your regulator and try to calm your heartbeat.

I have.

There was much to marvel at in this encounter. Once I got past my own personal experience of disorientation I started to reflect upon the swirling phenomenon of the fish: how were they able to move so rapidly and simultaneously? What form of communication could account for their instantaneous changes of speed and motion? I had no answer, though I had seen this same behavior in flocks of chimney swallows and bats—and I am sure there are others. But what about us? Humans. The, theoretically, most evolved creatures on the planet.

My conclusion: The feature in human beings that corresponds most closely to the fish swarm phenomenon is: emotion. Hear me out.

A quote from the Preface to Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds comes to mind.

In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity.

Disasters, like those of the Myanmar cyclone and the China earthquake, often draw our attention simultaneously and we automatically respond sympathetically. We saw similar simultaneous outpourings after the fall of the twin towers and after Hurricane Katrina. Max Scheler, German philosopher, identified this simultaneity as what he called a "community of feeling":

"Two parents stand beside the dead body of a beloved child. They feel in common the 'same' sorrow, the 'same' anguish. It is not that A feels this sorrow and B feels it also, and moreover that they both know they are feeling it. No, it is a feeling-in-common, A's sorrow is in no way an 'external' matter for B here, as it is, e.g. for their friend C, who joins them, and commiserates 'with them' or 'upon their sorrow'. On the contrary, they feel it together, in the sense that they feel and experience in common, not only the self-same value-situation, but also the same keenness of emotion in regard to it." The Nature of Sympathy, pp.12-13.

Humans are more complex animals than fish or swallows or bats and are capable of more complex, mediated, individual responses. A human emotional response might provoke any of a number or actions—or none at all. However, that doesn't mean there is no emotional response; it just means we don't automatically swarm when we have these simultaneous feelings.

I think it's safe to say that the more significant the cause, the more profound the emotional response, and, thus, the greater the likelihood of a herd/flock/swarm reaction.

[More to follow]

There's more

The headline reads: "2008's Tornado Toll Deadliest In A Decade" You may not have these monsters where you live.

And now, wildfire season in Florida. Not as disastrous as in California or Australia or Canada, but trouble nonetheless.

And now this

A massive earthquake strikes central China.