What is a group and why does it matter?

Almost seems like a silly question. 

A group (for my purposes here) is defined by the OED as “A number of people or things that are located, gathered, or classed together; Put into categories; classify.”

In this sense, classifying people into groups is an action undertaken not by the people classified but from those wishing to create a group by means of classification. Classifying people into groups is called a construct (meaning “an idea or theory containing various conceptual elements, typically one considered to be subjective and not based on empirical evidence” OED). In other words, a construct is constructed using elements selected by the classifier.

So what?

Well, it seems to me a great many people have forgotten that groups are not real things in themselves existing independently. They are subjective constructs (and a handy verbal shortcut for defining a portion of some population linked to the selected element they share). I think a reminder of this fact is in order when groups are used as if they existed independently of those who construct them… in exactly the same way many religious people need reminding that their faith-based belief in a divine and creative construct come from them and are not extracted in whole from reality. After all, if compelling evidence from reality could be extracted in such a way to demonstrate this independent existence of some divine construct, then no faith would be needed to construct and maintain the belief! The belief would become fact. The same is true for group constructs.

Why does this reminder about groups and the fact they they are constructed by artificial means – by the subjective selection of an element or elements – matter?

Believing groups are not subjective constructs but objective entities that then become independent objects subject to effect is a thinking error. It is a category mistake. Groups are not real things, real objects.

Groups of people are made up of individuals with an assortment of things, a wide variety of potential elements, that can be selected as the necessary element for membership in a group. But what is often forgotten is that what’s real, what’s true, is that the groups are constructs but the individuals who constitute them are the real objects. Very real. Policies and procedures that favour groups as real things over individuals as merely interchangeable parts whose primary value is the selected element demonstrate this forgetfulness of this fundamental importance of the individual, that without the base individual units, there is no group. The group is the construct; the individual is real. Selecting elements to form groups is a subjective and often biased procedure (not that bias is necessarily bad or unwanted or degrading but simply selected) and creates an artificial construct that is not real. Individuals are real and are made up of innumerable primary, secondary, and tertiary elements that can be selected for membership in this group or that one, in these 612 but not in those 74,817 groups.

Primary elements can be used like loose or attached ear lobes. Mustaches. Heart rate at rest. Number of offspring. Gonads. Hair colour. Weight. And so on. Specific knowable facts captured in time. Handy facts.

Then there are the additional secondary elements that can be used not so easily measured but simply shared… like interests, abilities, preferences and so on. Handy perhaps for dating, forming bands and reading groups, or aligning people with political parties.

The tertiary elements are even harder to define and measure without using some imported framework to create a means to compare and contrast, a framework like race, intelligence, sexuality, class, and so on. These terms have to first be defined and described as divisible into classifications first (always problematic but possible and often very practical in the mean) before one can be used as element for group selection. This is the meat and potatoes of Postmodernism, and its various offshoots of grievance studies, political correctness, identity politics, and being ‘woken’.

A group can be POOF!ed into being by the selection of one or more elements that we choose to define our constructed group. (As I mentioned, this can be problematic but also of practical effect, too; think of calculating medical risk, polling, voting preferences, advertising, search engine algorithms, and so on: group trends can be predictive.)

But here’s the kicker: when we think of people based on their group identity, we also POOF! into being all those not included. Two groups are always formed for the price of one! The with-the-element group and the without-the-element group. You cannot construct groups without constructing their binary and opposite twin. (We see this especially made clear in tertiary group constructs but always presented as the negative, such as the Oppressors of the Oppressed, the Victimizers of the Victims, the Privileged of the Underprivileged, and so on.)  Thinking and defining people by their group membership, group identity, means thinking and defining people in this binary fashion: included/excluded, Us/Them, with/without. This has huge and negative social consequences for everyone, for every individual who can be relegated to the negative group by the proclamation of social constructionist who made you as an individual into a despised and deplorable group member.

As the importance and defining characteristic of group membership rises through the ranks of being used not as personal constructs but into more widely accepted political entities that exist, of course it must be accompanied by an identical rise in partisanship. Partisanship is part and parcel of using group identity: the in-group element, the lack of the in-group element. Hand in hand. We make partisanship real and important and empowering when we use group thinking for identity politics.

It is essential, therefore, to be reminded that identity for membership in both the in-groups and out-groups is an artificial construct empowered only to the extent to which people are willing to grant it real world effect. Think of Blacks in apartheid South Africa. Think Jewish in Nazi Germany. Think Kulak in Soviet Russia. Think counter-revolutionary in Maoist China. Think acadmic in Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Group thinking and the partisanship divide that it comes with can be the very worst human trait ever to motivate large groups of people.

What links all members of any in- or out-group together is the fact that both are made up of individuals, and so no real world effect drawn from group membership should cross the boundary into effecting this shared standard of respect, tolerance, dignity, and equality in law for ALL individuals that contains ALL the elements that can be used to form ANY group. That’s the sacrosanct base unit against which any and all group thinking must first respect. Not groups. Individuals.